Language identification in the limit is a formal model for inductive inference of formal languages, mainly by computers (see machine learning and induction of regular languages). It was introduced by E. Mark Gold in a technical report and a journal article with the same title. In this model, a teacher provides to a learner some presentation (i.e. a sequence of strings) of some formal language. The learning is seen as an infinite process. Each time the learner reads an element of the presentation, it should provide a representation (e.g. a formal grammar) for the language. Gold defines that a learner can identify in the limit a class of languages if, given any presentation of any language in the class, the learner will produce only a finite number of wrong representations, and then stick with the correct representation. However, the learner need not be able to announce its correctness; and the teacher might present a counterexample to any representation arbitrarily long after. Gold defined two types of presentations: Text (positive information): an enumeration of all strings the language consists of. Complete presentation (positive and negative information): an enumeration of all possible strings, each with a label indicating if the string belongs to the language or not. Learnability This model is an early attempt to formally capture the notion of learnability. Gold's journal article introduces for contrast the stronger models Finite identification (where the learner has to announce correctness after a finite number of steps), and Fixed-time identification (where correctness has to be reached after an apriori-specified number of steps). A weaker formal model of learnability is the Probably approximately correct learning (PAC) model, introduced by Leslie Valiant in 1984. Examples It is instructive to look at concrete examples (in the tables) of learning sessions the definition of identification in the limit speaks about. A fictitious session to learn a regular language L over the alphabet {a,b} from text presentation:In each step, the teacher gives a string belonging to L, and the learner answers a guess for L, encoded as a regular expression. In step 3, the learner's guess is not consistent with the strings seen so far; in step 4, the teacher gives a string repeatedly. After step 6, the learner sticks to the regular expression (ab+ba)*. If this happens to be a description of the language L the teacher has in mind, it is said that the learner has learned