Abstract

Recently, rich subclasses of elementary formal systems (EFS) have been shown to be identifiable in the limit from only positive data. Examples of these classes are Angluin’s pattern languages, unions of pattern languages by Wright and Shinohara, and classes of languages definable by length-bounded elementary formal systems studied by Shinohara. The present paper employs two distinct bodies of abstract studies in the inductive inference literature to analyze the learnability of these concrete classes. The first approach, introduced by Freivalds and Smith, uses constructive ordinals to bound the number of mind changes. ω denotes the first limit ordinal. An ordinal mind change bound of ω means that identification can be carried out by a learner that after examining some element(s) of the language announces an upper bound on the number of mind changes it will make before converging; a bound of ω · 2 means that the learner reserves the right to revise this upper bound once; a bound of ω · 3 means the learner reserves the right to revise this upper bound twice, and so on. A bound of ω 2 means that identification can be carried out by a learner that announces an upper bound on the number of times it may revise its conjectured upper bound on the number of mind changes. It is shown in the present paper that the ordinal mind change complexity for identification of languages formed by unions of up to n pattern languages is ω n. It is

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