TY - GEN
T1 - Unlearning helps
AU - Baliga, Ganesh
AU - Case, John
AU - Merkle, Wolfgang
AU - Stephan, Frank
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.
PY - 2000
Y1 - 2000
N2 - Overregularization seen in child language learning, re verb tense constructs, involves abandoning correct behaviors for incorrect ones and later reverting to correct behaviors. Quite a number of other child development phenomena also follow this U-shaped form of learning, un- learning, and relearning. A decisive learner doesn’t do this and, in general, never abandons an hypothesis H for an inequivalent one where it later conjectures an hypothesis equivalent to H. The present paper shows that decisiveness is a real restriction on Gold’s model of iteratively (or in the limit) learning of grammars for languages from positive data. This suggests that natural U-shaped learning curves may not be a mere accident in the evolution of human learning, but may be necessary for learning. The result also solves an open problem. Second-time decisive learners conjecture each of their hypotheses for a language at most twice. By contrast, they are shown not to restrict Gold’s model of learning, and correspondingly, there is an apparent lack of re- ports in child development of the opposite, W-shaped learning curves.
AB - Overregularization seen in child language learning, re verb tense constructs, involves abandoning correct behaviors for incorrect ones and later reverting to correct behaviors. Quite a number of other child development phenomena also follow this U-shaped form of learning, un- learning, and relearning. A decisive learner doesn’t do this and, in general, never abandons an hypothesis H for an inequivalent one where it later conjectures an hypothesis equivalent to H. The present paper shows that decisiveness is a real restriction on Gold’s model of iteratively (or in the limit) learning of grammars for languages from positive data. This suggests that natural U-shaped learning curves may not be a mere accident in the evolution of human learning, but may be necessary for learning. The result also solves an open problem. Second-time decisive learners conjecture each of their hypotheses for a language at most twice. By contrast, they are shown not to restrict Gold’s model of learning, and correspondingly, there is an apparent lack of re- ports in child development of the opposite, W-shaped learning curves.
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U2 - 10.1007/3-540-45022-x_71
DO - 10.1007/3-540-45022-x_71
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33745806143
SN - 9783540450221
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 844
EP - 856
BT - Automata, Languages and Programming - 27th International Colloquium, ICALP 2000, Proceedings
A2 - Montanari, Ugo
A2 - Rolim, Jose D. P.
A2 - Welzl, Emo
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 27th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2000
Y2 - 9 July 2000 through 15 July 2000
ER -