An investigation into theory completion techniques in inductive logic programming

Thesis

Traditional Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) focuses on the setting where the target theory is a generalisation of the observations. This is known as Observational Predicate Learning (OPL). In the Theory Completion setting the target theory is not in the same predicate as the observations (non-OPL). This thesis investigates two alternative simple extensions to traditional ILP to perform non-OPL or Theory Completion. Both techniques perform extraction-case abduction from an existing background theory and one seed observation. The first technique -- Logical Back-propagation -- modifies the existing background theory so that abductions can be achieved by a form of constructive negation using a standard SLD-resolution theorem prover. The second technique -- SOLD-resolution -- modifies the theorem prover, and leaves the existing background theory unchanged. It is shown that all abductions produced by Logical Back-propagation can also be generated by SOLD-resolution; but the reverse does not hold. The implementation using the SOLD-resolution technique -- the ALECTO system -- was applied to the problems of completing context free and context dependant grammars; and learning Event Calculus programs. It was successfully able to learn an Event Calculus program to control the navigation of a real-life robot. The Event Calculus is a formalism to represent common-sense knowledge. It follows that the discovery of some common-sense knowledge was produced with the assistance of a machine.

Authors: Moyle, SA

• Publication date: 2003
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: theory revision; SOLD-resolution; inductive logic programming; logical back-propagation; machine learning; abduction; theory completion; event calculus
• Subjects: Computing