Discovering Business Processes models expressed as DNF or CNF formulae of Declare constraints

In the field of Business Process Management, the Process Discovery task is one of the most important and researched topics. It aims to automatically learn process models starting from a given set of logged execution traces. The majority of the approaches employ procedural languages for describing the discovered models, but declarative languages have been proposed as well. In the latter category there is the Declare language, based on the notion of constraint, and equipped with a formal semantics on LTLf. Also, quite common in the field is to consider the log as a set of positive examples only, but some recent approaches pointed out that a binary classification task (with positive and negative examples) might provide better outcomes. In this paper, we discuss our preliminary work on the adaptation of some existing algorithms for Inductive Logic Programming, to the specific setting of Process Discovery: in particular, we adopt the Declare language with its formal semantics, and the perspective of a binary classification task (i.e., with positive and negative examples

Logic Programming Applications: What Are the Abstractions and Implementations?

This article presents an overview of applications of logic programming, classifying them based on the abstractions and implementations of logic languages that support the applications. The three key abstractions are join, recursion, and constraint. Their essential implementations are for-loops, fixed points, and backtracking, respectively. The corresponding kinds of applications are database queries, inductive analysis, and combinatorial search, respectively. We also discuss language extensions and programming paradigms, summarize example application problems by application areas, and touch on example systems that support variants of the abstractions with different implementations

A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: $(i)$ extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or $(ii)$ designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a {\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure

Logic-based Technologies for Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Perspectives

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future

Structure Selection from Streaming Relational Data

Statistical relational learning techniques have been successfully applied in a wide range of relational domains. In most of these applications, the human designers capitalized on their background knowledge by following a trial-and-error trajectory, where relational features are manually defined by a human engineer, parameters are learned for those features on the training data, the resulting model is validated, and the cycle repeats as the engineer adjusts the set of features. This paper seeks to streamline application development in large relational domains by introducing a light-weight approach that efficiently evaluates relational features on pieces of the relational graph that are streamed to it one at a time. We evaluate our approach on two social media tasks and demonstrate that it leads to more accurate models that are learned faster

Process Discovery on Deviant Traces and Other Stranger Things

As the need to understand and formalise business processes into a model has grown over the last years, the process discovery research field has gained more and more importance, developing two different classes of approaches to model representation: procedural and declarative. Orthogonally to this classification, the vast majority of works envisage the discovery task as a one-class supervised learning process guided by the traces that are recorded into an input log. In this work instead, we focus on declarative processes and embrace the less-popular view of process discovery as a binary supervised learning task, where the input log reports both examples of the normal system execution, and traces representing a “stranger” behaviour according to the domain semantics. We therefore deepen how the valuable information brought by both these two sets can be extracted and formalised into a model that is “optimal” according to user-defined goals. Our approach, namely NegDis, is evaluated w.r.t. other relevant works in this field, and shows promising results regarding both the performance and the quality of the obtained solution