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 entailment leads to new results for learning from positive data and inverting implication between pairs of clauses.

Knowledge acquisition is a difficult, error-prone, and time-consuming task. The task of automatically improving an existing knowledge base using learning methods is addressed by the class of systems performing theory refinement. This paper presents a system, Forte (First-Order Revision of Theories from Examples), which refines first-order Horn-clause theories by integrating a variety of different revision techniques into a coherent whole. Forte uses these techniques within a hill-climbing framework, guided by a global heuristic. It identifies possible errors in the theory and calls on a library of operators to develop possible revisions. The best revision is implemented, and the process repeats until no further revisions are possible. Operators are drawn from a variety of sources, including propositional theory refinement, first-order induction, and inverse resolution. Forte is demonstrated in several domains, including logic programming and qualitative modelling.

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a research area which investigates the construction of first-order definite clause theories from examples and background knowledge. ILP systems have been applied successfully in a number of real-world domains. These include the learning of structureactivity rules for drug design, finite-element mesh design rules, rules for primary-secondary prediction of protein structure and fault diagnosis rules for satellites. There is a well established tradition of learning-in-the-limit results in ILP. Recently some results within Valiant's PAC-learning framework have also been demonstrated for ILP systems. In this paper it is argued that algorithms can be directly derived from the formal specifications of ILP. This provides a common basis for Inverse Resolution, ExplanationBased Learning, Abduction and Relative Least General Generalisation. A new general-purpose, efficient approach to predicate invention is demonstrated. ILP is underconstrained by its logical ...

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.

All generalisations within logic involve inverting implication. Yet, ever since Plotkin's work in the early 1970's methods of generalising first-order clauses have involved inverting the clausal subsumption relationship. However, even Plotkin realised that this approach was incomplete. Since inversion of subsumption is central to many Inductive Logic Programming approaches, this form of incompleteness has been propagated to techniques such as Inverse Resolution and Relative Least General Generalisation. A more complete approach to inverting implication has been attempted with some success recently by Lapointe and Matwin. In the present paper the author derives general solutions to this problem from first principles. It is shown that clausal subsumption is only incomplete for self-recursive clauses. Avoiding this incompleteness involves algorithms which find "nth roots" of clauses. Completeness and correctness results are proved for a non-deterministic algorithms which constructs nth ro...

. We present an algorithm for inducing recursive clauses using inverse implication (rather than inverse resolution) as the underlying generalization method. Our approach applies to a class of logic programs similar to the class of primitive recursive functions. Induction is performed using a small number of positive examples that need not be along the same resolution path. Our algorithm, implemented in a system named CRUSTACEAN, locates matched lists of generating terms that determine the pattern of decomposition exhibited in the (target) recursive clause. Our theoretical analysis defines the class of logic programs for which our approach is complete, described in terms characteristic of other ILP approaches. Our current implementation is considerably faster than previously reported. We present evidence demonstrating that, given randomly selected inputs, increasing the number of positive examples increases accuracy and reduces the number of outputs. We relate our approach to similar re...

Induction of recursive theories in the normal ILP setting is a difficult learning task whose complexity is equivalent to multiple predicate learning. In this paper we propose computational solutions to some relevant issues raised by the multiple predicate learning problem. A separate-andparallel -conquer search strategy is adopted to interleave the learning of clauses supplying predicates with mutually recursive definitions. A novel generality order to be imposed on the search space of clauses is investigated, in order to cope with recursion in a more suitable way. The consistency recovery is performed by reformulating the current theory and by applying a layering technique, based on the collapsed dependency graph. The proposed approach has been implemented in the ILP system ATRE and tested on some laboratory-sized and real-world data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that ATRE is able to learn correct theories autonomously and to discover concept dependencies. Finally, related works and their main differences with our approach are discussed.

We evaluate CRUSTACEAN, an inductive logic programming algorithm that uses inverse implication to induce recursive clauses from examples. This approach is well suited for learning a class of self-recursive clauses, which commonly appear in logic programs, because it searches for common substructures among the examples. However, little evidence exists that inverse implication approaches perform well when given only randomly selected positive and negative examples. We show that CRUSTACEAN learns recursive relations with higher accuracies than GOLEM, yet with reasonable efficiency. We also demonstrate that increasing the number of randomly selected positive and negative examples increases its accuracy on randomly selected test examples, increases the frequency in which it outputs the target relation, and reduces its number of outputs. We also prove a theorem that defines the class of logic programs for which our approach is complete. 1 MOTIVATION This paper extends our previous work (Ah...

In the area of inductive learning, generalization is a main operation, and the usual definition of induction is based on logical implication. Recently there has been a rising interest in clausal representation of knowledge in machine learning. Almost all inductive learning systems that perform generalization of clauses use the relation `-subsumption instead of implication. The main reason is that there is a well-known and simple technique to compute least general generalizations under `-subsumption, but not under implication. However generalization under `-subsumption is inappropriate for learning recursive clauses, which is a crucial problem since recursion is the basic program structure of logic programs. We note that implication between clauses is undecidable, and we therefore introduce a stronger form of implication, called T-implication, which is decidable between clauses. We show that for every finite set of clauses there exists a least general generalization under T-implic...

Abstract This dissertation investigates the field of inductive logic programming (ILP) and in so doing an ILP system, Lime, is designed and developed. Lime addresses the problem of noisy training examples; learning from only positive, only negative, or both positive and negative examples; efficiently biasing and searching the hypothesis space; and handling recursion efficiently and effectively. The Q-heuristic is introduced to address the problem of learning with both noisy training examples and fixed numbers of positive and negative training examples. This heuristics is based on Bayes rule. Both a justification of its derivation and a description of the context in which it is appropriately applied are given. Because of the general nature of this heuristic its application is not restricted to ILP. Instead of employing a greedy covering approach to constructing clauses, Lime employs the Qheuristic to evaluate entire logic programs as hypotheses. To tame the inevitable explosion in the search space, the notion of a simple clause is introduced. These sets of literals may be viewed as subparts of clauses that are effectively independent in terms of variables used. Instead of growing a clause one literal at a time, Lime efficiently combines simple clauses to construct a set of gainful candidate clauses. Subsets of these candidate clauses are evaluated using the Q-heuristic to find the final hypothesis. Details of the algorithms and data structures of Lime are discussed. Lime's handling of recursive logic programs is also described. Experimental results are provided to illustrate how Lime achieves its design goals of better noise handling, learning from a fixed set of examples (e.g., from only positive data), and of learning recursive logic programs. These results compare the performance of Lime with other leading ILP systems like Foil and Progol in a variety of domains. Empirical results with a boosted version of Lime are also reported.