678 research outputs found
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
On the Implementation of the Probabilistic Logic Programming Language ProbLog
The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the field of
probabilistic logic learning and statistical relational learning. In this
endeavor, many probabilistic logics have been developed. ProbLog is a recent
probabilistic extension of Prolog motivated by the mining of large biological
networks. In ProbLog, facts can be labeled with probabilities. These facts are
treated as mutually independent random variables that indicate whether these
facts belong to a randomly sampled program. Different kinds of queries can be
posed to ProbLog programs. We introduce algorithms that allow the efficient
execution of these queries, discuss their implementation on top of the
YAP-Prolog system, and evaluate their performance in the context of large
networks of biological entities.Comment: 28 pages; To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
(TPLP
Probabilistic (logic) programming concepts
A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position and survey state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been considered for over 20 years
Recommended from our members
Working notes of the 1991 spring symposium on constraint-based reasoning
Qualitative Uncertainty Orderings Revised
AbstractIn recent decades, qualitative approaches to probabilistic uncertainty have been receiving wider and wider attention. We propose a new characterization of some of the most adopted partial preference orders by providing an uniform axiomatic treatment of a variety of qualitative uncertainty notions. We prove a representation result that connects qualitative notions of partial uncertainty to their numerical counterparts. We also describe an executable specification, in the declarative framework of Answer Set Programming, that constitutes the core engine for the qualitative management of uncertainty. Some basic reasoning tasks are also identified
Optimization and inference under fuzzy numerical constraints
Εκτεταμένη έρευνα έχει γίνει στους τομείς της Ικανοποίησης Περιορισμών με
διακριτά (ακέραια) ή πραγματικά πεδία τιμών. Αυτή η έρευνα έχει οδηγήσει σε
πολλαπλές σημασιολογικές περιγραφές, πλατφόρμες και
συστήματα για την περιγραφή σχετικών προβλημάτων με επαρκείς βελτιστοποιήσεις.
Παρά ταύτα, λόγω της ασαφούς φύσης
πραγματικών προβλημάτων ή ελλιπούς μας γνώσης για αυτά, η σαφής μοντελοποίηση
ενός προβλήματος ικανοποίησης περιορισμών δεν είναι πάντα ένα εύκολο ζήτημα ή
ακόμα και η καλύτερη προσέγγιση. Επιπλέον, το πρόβλημα της μοντελοποίησης και
επίλυσης ελλιπούς γνώσης είναι ακόμη δυσκολότερο. Επιπροσθέτως, πρακτικές
απαιτήσεις μοντελοποίησης και μέθοδοι βελτιστοποίησης του χρόνου αναζήτησης
απαιτούν συνήθως ειδικές πληροφορίες για το πεδίο εφαρμογής,
καθιστώντας τη δημιουργία ενός γενικότερου πλαισίου βελτιστοποίησης ένα
ιδιαίτερα δύσκολο πρόβλημα. Στα πλαίσια αυτής της εργασίας θα μελετήσουμε το
πρόβλημα της μοντελοποίησης και αξιοποίησης σαφών, ελλιπών ή ασαφών
περιορισμών, καθώς και πιθανές στρατηγικές βελτιστοποίησης. Καθώς τα
παραδοσιακά προβλήματα ικανοποίησης περιορισμών λειτουργούν βάσει συγκεκριμένων
και προκαθορισμένων κανόνων και σχέσεων, παρουσιάζει ενδιαφέρον η διερεύνηση
στρατηγικών και βελτιστοποιήσεων που θα επιτρέπουν το συμπερασμό νέων ή/και
αποδοτικότερων περιορισμών. Τέτοιοι επιπρόσθετοι κανόνες θα μπορούσαν να
βελτιώσουν τη διαδικασία αναζήτησης μέσω της εφαρμογής αυστηρότερων περιορισμών
και περιορισμού του χώρου αναζήτησης ή να προσφέρουν χρήσιμες πληροφορίες στον
αναλυτή για τη φύση του προβλήματος που
μοντελοποιεί.Extensive research has been done in the areas of Constraint Satisfaction with
discrete/integer
and real domain ranges. Multiple platforms and systems to deal with these kinds
of domains have been developed and appropriately optimized. Nevertheless, due
to the incomplete and possibly vague nature of real-life problems, modeling a
crisp and adequately strict satisfaction problem may not always be easy or even
appropriate. The problem of modeling incomplete
knowledge or solving an incomplete/relaxed representation of a problem is a
much harder issue to tackle. Additionally, practical modeling requirements and
search optimizations require specific domain knowledge in order to be
implemented, making the creation of a more generic optimization framework an
even harder problem.In this thesis, we will study the problem of modeling and
utilizing incomplete and fuzzy constraints, as well as possible optimization
strategies. As constraint satisfaction problems usually contain hard-coded
constraints based on specific problem and domain knowledge, we will investigate
whether strategies and generic heuristics exist for inferring new constraint
rules. Additional rules could optimize the search process by implementing
stricter constraints and thus pruning the search space or even provide useful
insight to the researcher concerning the nature of the investigated problem
- …