Inductive logic programming

Abstract: Relief algorithms are general and successful attribute estimators. They are able to detect conditional dependencies between attributes and provide a unified view on the attribute estimation in regression and classification. In addition, their quality estimates have a natural interpretation. While they have commonly been viewed as feature subset selection methods that are applied in prepossessing step before a model is learned, they have actually been used successfully in a variety of settings, e.g., to select splits or to guide constructive induction in the building phase of decision or regression tree learning, as the attribute weighting method and also in the inductive logic programming. A broad spectrum of successful uses calls for especially careful investigation of various features Relief algorithms have. In this paper we theoretically and empirically investigate and discuss how and why they work, their theoretical and practical properties, their parameters, what kind of dependencies they detect, how do they scale up to large number of examples and features, how to sample data for them, how robust are they regarding the noise, how irrelevant and redundant attributes influence their output and how different metrics influences them.

Abstract: Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a new discipline which investigates the inductive construction of first-order clausal theories from examples and background knowledge. We survey the most important theories and methods of this new field. First, various problem specifications of ILP are formalized in semantic settings for ILP, yielding a “model-theory” for ILP. Second, a generic ILP algorithm is presented. Third, the inference rules and corresponding operators used in ILP are presented, resulting in a “proof-theory” for ILP. Fourth, since inductive inference does not produce statements which are assured to follow from what is given, inductive inferences require an alternative form of justification. This can take the form of either probabilistic support or logical constraints on the hypothesis language. Information compression techniques used within ILP are presented within a unifying Bayesian approach to confirmation and corroboration of hypotheses. Also, different ways to constrain the hypothesis language or specify the declarative bias are presented. Fifth, some advanced topics in ILP are addressed. These include aspects of computational learning theory as applied to ILP, and the issue of predicate invention. Finally, we survey some applications and implementations of ILP. ILP applications fall under two different categories: first, scientific discovery and knowledge acquisition, and second, programming assistants.

Abstract: This paper firstly provides a re-appraisal of the development of techniques for inverting deduction, secondly introduces Mode-Directed Inverse Entailment (MDIE) as a generalisation and enhancement of previous approaches and thirdly describes an implementation of MDIE in the Progol system. Progol is implemented in C and available by anonymous ftp. The re-assessment of previous techniques in terms of inverse implication leads to new results for learning from positive data and inverting implication between pairs of clauses.

Abstract: This paper presents recent work using the CHILL parser acquisition system to automate the construction of a natural-language interface for database queries. CHILL treats parser acquisition as the learning of search-control rules within a logic program representing a shift-reduce parser and uses techniques from Inductive Logic Programming to learn relational control knowledge. Starting with a general framework for constructing a suitable logical form, CHILL is able to train on a corpus comprising sentences paired with database queries and induce parsers that map subsequent sentences directly into executable queries. Experimental results with a complete database-query application for U.S. geography show that CHILL is able to learn parsers that outperform a preexisting, hand-crafted counterpart. These results demonstrate the ability of a corpus-based system to produce more than purely syntactic representations. They also provide direct evidence of the utility of an empirical approach at the level of a complete natural language application.