Polynomial-time Learnability of Logic Programs with Local Variables from Entailment

In this paper, we study exact learning of logic programs from entailment and present a polynomial time algorithm to learn a rich class of logic programs that allow local variables and include many standard programs like append, merge, split, delete, member, prefix, suffix, length, reverse, append/4 on lists, tree traversal programs on binary trees and addition, multiplication and exponentiation on natural numbers. Grafting a few aspects of incremental learning [10] onto the framework of learning from entailment [3], we generalize the existing results to allow local variables, which play an important role of sideways information passing in the paradigm of logic programming