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The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable world wide knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a

The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a knowledge base would enable much more effective retrieval of Web information, and promote new uses of the Web to support knowledge-based inference and problem solving. Our approach is to develop a trainable information extraction system that takes two inputs. The first is an ontology that defines the classes (e.g., company, person, employee, product) and relations (e.g., employed_by, produced_by) of interest when creating the knowledge base. The second is a set of training data consisting of labeled regions of hypertext that represent instances of these classes and relations. Given these inputs, the system learns to extract information from other pages and hyperlinks on the Web. This article describes our general a...

This paper is a survey of inductive rule learning algorithms that use a separate-and-conquer strategy. This strategy can be traced back to the AQ learning system and still enjoys popularity as can be seen from its frequent use in inductive logic programming systems. We will put this wide variety of algorithms into a single framework and analyze them along three different dimensions, namely their search, language and overfitting avoidance biases.

. Learning multiple descriptions for each class in the data has been shown to reduce generalization error but the amount of error reduction varies greatly from domain to domain. This paper presents a novel empirical analysis that helps to understand this variation. Our hypothesis is that the amount of error reduction is linked to the "degree to which the descriptions for a class make errors in a correlated manner." We present a precise and novel definition for this notion and use twenty-nine data sets to show that the amount of observed error reduction is negatively correlated with the degree to which the descriptions make errors in a correlated manner. We empirically show that it is possible to learn descriptions that make less correlated errors in domains in which many ties in the search evaluation measure (e.g. information gain) are experienced during learning. The paper also presents results that help to understand when and why multiple descriptions are a help (irrelevant attribute...

This paper outlines some problems that may occur with Reduced Error Pruning in Inductive Logic Programming , most notably efficiency. Thereafter a new method, Incremental Reduced Error Pruning , is proposed that attempts to address all of these problems. Experiments show that in many noisy domains this method is much more efficient than alternative algorithms, along with a slight gain in accuracy. However, the experiments show as well that the use of this algorithm cannot be recommended for domains with a very specific concept description. OEFAI-TR-94-09 1 Introduction Being able to deal with noisy data is a must for algorithms that are meant to learn concepts in real-world domains. Significant effort has gone into investigating the effect of noisy data on decision tree learning algorithms (see e.g. [Quinlan, 1993, Breiman et al., 1984]). Not surprisingly, noise handling methods have also entered the emerging field of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) [Muggleton, 1992]. Linus [Lavr...

In many real-world domains the task of machine learning algorithms is to learn a theory predicting numerical values. In particular several standard test domains used in Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) are concerned with predicting numerical values from examples and relational and mostly non-determinate background knowledge. However, so far no ILP algorithm except one can predict numbers and cope with non-determinate background knowledge. (The only exception is a covering algorithm called FORS.) In this paper we present Structural Regression Trees (SRT), a new algorithm which can be applied to the above class of problems by integrating the statistical method of regression trees into ILP. SRT constructs a tree containing a literal (an atomic formula or its negation) or a conjunction of literals in each node, and assigns a numerical value to each leaf. SRT provides more comprehensible results than purely statistical methods, and can be applied to a class of problems most other ILP syste...

Many learning algorithms form concept descriptions composed of clauses, each of which covers some proportion of the positive training data and a small to zero proportion of the negative training data. This paper presents a method using likelihood ratios attached to clauses to classify test examples. One concept description is learned for each class. Each concept description competes to classify the test example using the likelihood ratios assigned to clauses of that concept description. By testing on several artificial and "real world" domains, we demonstrate that attaching weights and allowing concept descriptions to compete to classify examples reduces an algorithm's susceptibility to noise.

We present a new approach to learning hypertext classifiers that combines a statistical text-learning method with a relational rule learner. This approach is well suited to learning in hypertext domains because its statistical component allows it to characterize text in terms of word frequencies, whereas its relational component is able to describe how neighboring documents are related to each other by hyperlinks that connect them. We evaluate our approach by applying it to tasks that involve learning definitions for (i) classes of pages, (ii) particular relations that exist between pairs of pages, and (iii) locating a particular class of information in the internal structure of pages. Our experiments demonstrate that this new approach is able to learn more accurate classifiers than either of its constituent methods alone. Keywords: Relational Learning, Text Categorization, Predicate Invention, Naive Bayes

We report results of experiments on several data sets, in particular: Monk's problems data (see [58]), medical data (lymphography, breast cancer, primary tumor - see [30]) and StatLog's data (see [32]). We compare standard methods for extracting laws from decision tables (see [43], [52]), based on rough set (see [42]) and boolean reasoning (see [8]), with the method based on dynamic reducts and dynamic rules (see [3],[4],[5],[6]). We also compare the results of computer experiments on those data sets obtained by applying our system based on rough set methods with the results on the same data sets obtained with help of several data analysis systems known from literature.