Grammatical inference

The 7th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2004) was heldintheNationalCentreforScienti?cResearch“Demokritos”,Athens,Greece on October 11–13, 2004. ICGI 2004 was the seventh in a series of successful biennial international conferences in the area of grammaticalinference. Previous meetings were held in Essex, UK; Alicante, Spain; Montpellier, France; Ames, Iowa, USA; Lisbon, Portugal; and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This series of conferences seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference. Grammatical inference, the study of learning grammars from data, is an - tablishedresearch?eldinarti?cialintelligence,datingbacktothe1960s,andhas been extensively addressed by researchers in automata theory, language acqui- tion, computational linguistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, compu- tional learning theory and neural networks. ICGI 2004 emphasized the multid- ciplinary natureoftheresearch?eldandthe diversedomains inwhich gramm- ical inference is being applied, such as natural language acquisition, compu- tionalbiology,structuralpatternrecognition,informationretrieval,Webmining, t