Logical hidden Markov models (LOHMMs) upgrade traditional hidden Markov models to deal with sequences of structured symbols in the form of logical atoms, rather than flat characters. This note formally introduces LOHMMs and presents solutions to the three central inference problems for LOHMMs: evaluation, most likely hidden state sequence and parameter estimation. The resulting representation and algorithms are experimentally evaluated on problems from the domain of bioinformatics.
In this paper we explore the idea of characterizing sentences by the shapes of their structural descriptions only; for example, in the case of context free grammars, by the shapes of the derivation trees only. Such structural descriptions will be called skeletons . A skeleton exhibits all of the grouping structure (phrase structure) of the sentence without naming the syntactic categories used in the description. The inclusion of syntactic categories as variables is primarily a question of economy of description. Every context free grammar is strongly equivalent to a skelet al grammar, in a sense made precise in the paper. Besides clarifying the role of skeletons in mathematical linguistics, we show that skelet al automata provide a characterization of local sets, remedying a “defect” in the usual tree automata theory. We extend the method of skelet al structural descriptions to other forms of tree describing systems. We also suggest a theoretical basis for grammatical inference based on grouping structure only.