SCOPE, LOCATION AND PROCEEDINGS

ICGI 2014 is the 12th edition of the International Conference on Grammatical Inference series, held every two years.

The conference will be held in Kyoto University; in Kyoto, Japan, from September 17—19, 2014. Kyoto is one of the most beautiful and historic cities in the world.

The conference proceedings will be published with the JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings series.
IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2014.
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2014.
Camera ready copy: August 1, 2014.
Conference: September 17—19, 2014.

AREAS OF INTEREST

The conference is on grammatical inference: the field of machine learning applied to discrete combinatorial structures such as strings, trees or graphs. The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including, but not limited to:

Theoretical aspects of grammatical inference: learning paradigms, learnability results, complexity of learning.
Efficient learning algorithms for language classes inside and outside the Chomsky hierarchy. Learning tree and graph grammars. Learning distributions over strings, trees or graphs.
Grammatical inference from strings or trees paired with semantics representations, or learning by situated agents and robots.
Theoretical and experimental analysis of different approaches to grammar induction, including artificial neural networks, statistical methods, symbolic methods, information-theoretic approaches, minimum description length, complexity-theoretic approaches, heuristic methods, etc.
Novel approaches to grammatical inference: Induction by DNA computing or quantum computing, evolutionary approaches, new representation spaces, etc.
Successful applications of grammatical inference to tasks in natural language processing such as unsupervised parsing, bioinformatics, web interface design, robot navigation, machine translation, pattern recognition, language acquisition, software engineering, computational linguistics, spam and malware detection, cognitive psychology, etc.

Historically the roots of grammatical inference have been in the modelling of first language acquisition by human infants: we especially invite submissions that address this theme, directly or indirectly.
AUTHOR GUIDELINES
We invite two types of papers:

Formal and/or technical papers describe original solutions (theoretical, methodological or conceptual) in the field of grammatical inference. A technical paper should clearly describe the situation or problem tackled, the relevant state of the art, the position or solution suggested and the benefits of the contribution.
Exploratory papers can describe completely new research positions or approaches. Open problems may be suggested, current limits can be discussed. In all cases rigour in presentation will be required. Such papers must describe precisely the situation, problem, challenge addressed and demonstrate how current methods, tools, ways of reasoning, may be inadequate. The authors must rigorously present their approach and demonstrate its pertinence and correctness to addressing the identified situation.

There are no restrictions on the domain of application as long as the paper provides sufficient background information.

The conference proceedings will be published with The JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings series.
CONFERENCE FORMAT

The conference will include plenary and invited talks, possibly software demonstrations and poster presentations of accepted papers.
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Prospective authors are invited to submit a draft paper which represents original and previously unpublished work. Simultaneous submission to other conferences with published proceedings is not allowed.

Submissions should conform to the guidelines that will be found on this conference webpage.

All papers should be submitted electronically by May 15, 2014; the submission URL is:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=icgi2014

Papers must be submitted in pdf format. The use of LaTeX is strongly encouraged. The users of Word may download a conversion tool to produce a PDF file for submission.

The total length of the paper should not exceed 12 pages on A4 or letter-size paper, and should be in single-column format using at least 1 inch margins and 11-point font.

Each paper should contain title, authors and affiliation, mailing address, a brief abstract describing the work and at least three keywords which can describe the contents of the work.
BEST STUDENT PAPER PRIZE

The best paper with a student as the lead and presenting author will be awarded a free registration prize. Eligible papers should be noted in the submission and accompanied by a brief letter of support from the research advisor. It should be included in the paper submission at the front page. Recipient of the prize will be notified at the time of acceptance and the student will receive a winner diploma during the conference.

We are looking forward to your submissions.