Abstracts

• Dafydd Gibbon: Signs, Lexicon, Hypertext
  An integrative approach to the theory of signs will be presented, which attempts to provide explanations in a number of problem areas treated over the last few years in individual and project research in the department: ILEX (Integratex LEXicon), Time Map Phonology, Hypertext description.
• Anja Belz: Learning Phonotactic Constraints with a Genetic Algorithm
  In this talk I will present a formal approach to the automatic construction of phonotactic descriptions for given data sets, and a genetic-search method for automatically discovering finite-state automata that encode such descriptions. The method is equally suitable for discovering infinite and finite regular languages, either from complete or incomplete presentation of positive data. The degree of generalisation from a given incomplete data set to a superset can be controlled by a set of parameters. I will present results for data sets derived from existing formal descriptions of phonological phenomena and syllable phonotactics, and for data sets of Russian nouns.