A best-seller in its French edition, the construction of this book is original and its success in the French market demonstrates its appeal. It is based on three principles: 1. An organization of the chapters by families of algorithms : exhaustive search, divide and conquer, etc. At the contrary, there is no chapter only devoted to a systematic exposure of, say, algorithms on strings. Some of these will be found in different chapters. 2. For each family of algorithms, an introduction is given to the mathematical principles and the issues of a rigorous design, with one or two pedagogical examples. 3. For its most part, the book details 150 problems, spanning on seven families of algorithms. For each problem, a precise and progressive statement is given. More important, a complete solution is detailed, with respect to the design principles that have been presented ; often, some classical errors are pointed at. Roughly speaking, two thirds of the book are devoted to the detailed rational construction of the solutions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-96, held in Montpellier, France, in September 1996.
The 25 revised full papers contained in the book together with two invited key papers by Magerman and Knuutila were carefully selected for presentation at the conference. The papers are organized in sections on algebraic methods and algorithms, natural language and pattern recognition, inference and stochastic models, incremental methods and inductive logic programming, and operational issues.

A best-seller in its French edition, the construction of this book is original and its success in the French market demonstrates its appeal. It is based on three principles: 1. An organization of the chapters by families of algorithms : exhaustive search, divide and conquer, etc. At the contrary, there is no chapter only devoted to a systematic exposure of, say, algorithms on strings. Some of these will be found in different chapters. 2. For each family of algorithms, an introduction is given to the mathematical principles and the issues of a rigorous design, with one or two pedagogical examples. 3. For its most part, the book details 150 problems, spanning on seven families of algorithms. For each problem, a precise and progressive statement is given. More important, a complete solution is detailed, with respect to the design principles that have been presented ; often, some classical errors are pointed at. Roughly speaking, two thirds of the book are devoted to the detailed rational construction of the solutions.