Abstract not found

The clausal discovery engine Claudien is presented. Claudien is an inductive logic programming engine that fits in the knowledge discovery in databases and data mining paradigm as it discovers regularities that are valid in data. As such Claudien performs a novel induction task, which is called characteristic induction from closed observations, and which is related to existing formalizations of induction in logic. In characterising induction from closed observations, the regularities are represented by clausal theories, and the data using Herbrand interpretations. Claudien also employs a novel declarative bias mechanism to define the set of clauses that may appear in a hypothesis. Keywords : Inductive Logic Programming, Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Data Mining, Learning, Induction, Semantics for Induction, Logic of Induction, Parallel Learning. 1 Introduction Despite the fact that the areas of knowledge discovery in databases [Fayyad et al., 1995] and inductive logic programmin...

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.

This paper presents a method for inducing logic programs from examples that learns a new class of concepts called first-order decision lists, defined as ordered lists of clauses each ending in a cut. The method, called Foidl, is based on Foil (Quinlan, 1990) but employs intensional background knowledge and avoids the need for explicit negative examples. It is particularly useful for problems that involve rules with specific exceptions, such as learning the past-tense of English verbs, a task widely studied in the context of the symbolic/connectionist debate. Foidl is able to learn concise, accurate programs for this problem from significantly fewer examples than previous methods (both connectionist and symbolic). 1. Introduction Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a growing subtopic of machine learning that studies the induction of Prolog programs from examples in the presence of background knowledge (Muggleton, 1992; Lavrac & Dzeroski, 1994). Due to the expressiveness of first-order...

First-order learning involves finding a clause-form definition of a relation from examples of the relation and relevant background information. In this paper, a particular first-order learning system is modified to customize it for finding definitions of functional relations. This restriction leads to faster learning times and, in some cases, to definitions that have higher predictive accuracy. Other first-order learning systems might benefit from similar specialization. 1. Introduction Empirical learning is the subfield of AI that develops algorithms for constructing theories from data. Most classification research in this area has used the attribute-value formalism, in which data are represented as vectors of values of a fixed set of attributes and are labelled with one of a small number of discrete classes. A learning system then develops a mapping from attribute values to classes that can be used to classify unseen data. Despite the well-documented successes of algorithms develope...

The inductive synthesis of recursive logic programs from incomplete information, such as input/output examples, is a challenging subfield both of ILP (Inductive Logic Programming) and of the synthesis (in general) of logic programs from formal specifications. We first overview past and present achievements, focusing on the techniques that were designed specifically for the inductive synthesis of recursive logic programs, but also discussing a few general ILP techniques that can also induce non-recursive hypotheses. Then we analyse the prospects of these techniques in this task, investigating their applicability to software engineering as well as to knowledge acquisition and discovery.

This paper reviews our recent work on applying inductive logic programming to the construction of natural language processing systems. We have developed a system, Chill, that learns a parser from a training corpus of parsed sentences by inducing heuristics that control an initial overly-general shift-reduce parser. Chill learns syntactic parsers as well as ones that translate English database queries directly into executable logical form. The ATIS corpus of airline information queries was used to test the acquisition of syntactic parsers, and Chill performed competitively with recent statistical methods. English queries to a small database on U.S. geography were used to test the acquisition of a complete natural language interface, and the parser that Chill acquired was more accurate than an existing hand-coded system. The paper also includes a discussion of several issues this work has raised regarding the capabilities and testing of ILP systems as well as a summary of our current research directions.

Editor: M. des Jardins and D. Gordon Abstract. A comparative study is presented of language biases employed in specific-to-general learning systems within the Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) paradigm. More specifically, we focus on the biases employed in three well known systems: CLINT, GOLEM and ITOU, and evaluate both conceptually and empirically their strengths and weaknesses. The evaluation is carried out within the generic framework of the NINA system, in which bias is a parameter. Two different types of biases are considered: syntactic bias, which defines the set of well-formed clauses, and semantic bias, which imposes restrictions on the behaviour of hypotheses or clauses. NINA is also able to shift its bias (within a predefined series of biases), whenever its current bias is insufficient for finding complete and consistent concept definitions. Furthermore, a new formalism for specifying the syntactic bias of inductive logic programming systems is introduced.

The clausal discovery engine claudien is presented. claudien discovers regularities in data and is a representative of the inductive logic programming paradigm. As such, it represents data and regularities by means of first order clausal theories. Because the search space of clausal theories is larger than that of attribute value representation, claudien also accepts as input a declarative specification of the language bias, which determines the set of syntactically well-formed regularities. Whereas other papers on claudien focuss on the semantics or logical problem specification of claudien, on the discovery algorithm, or the PAC-learning aspects, this paper wants to illustrate the power of the resulting technique. In order to achieve this aim, we show how claudien can be used to learn 1) integrity constraints in databases, 2) functional dependencies and determinations, 3) properties of sequences, 4) mixed quantitative and qualitative laws, 5) reverse engineering, and 6) classificati...

. We describe the principles and functionalities of Dlab (Declarative LAnguage Bias). Dlab can be used in inductive learning systems to define syntactically and traverse efficiently finite subspaces of first order clausal logic, be it a set of propositional formulae, association rules, Horn clauses, or full clauses. A Prolog implementation of Dlab is available by ftp access. Keywords: declarative language bias, concept learning, knowledge discovery 1 Introduction The notion bias, generally circumscribed as "a tendency to show prejudice against one group and favouritism towards another" (Collins Cobuild, 1987), has been adapted to the field of computational inductive reasoning to become a generic term for "any basis for choosing one generalization over another, other than strict consistency with the instances" (Mitchell [14]). We borrow a more finetuned definition of inductive bias from Utgoff [20]. Definition1 (inductive bias). Except for the presented examples and counterexamples ...