In this article, the current implementation of the Alignment-Based Learning (ABL) framework (van Zaanen, 2002) will be described. ABL is an unsupervised grammar induction system that is based on (1951) idea of substitutability. Instances of the framework can be applied to an untagged, unstructured corpus of natural language
sentences, resulting in a labelled, bracketed version of that corpus. Firstly, the framework aligns all sentences in the corpus
in pairs, resulting in a partition of the sentences consisting of parts of the sentences that are equal in both sentences
and parts that are unequal. Since substituting one unequal part for the other results in another valid sentence, the unequal
parts of the sentences are considered to be possible (possibly overlapping) constituents. Secondly, of all possible constituents
found by the first phase, the best are selected.