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

Logic programming for deliberative robotic task planning

Over the last decade, the use of robots in production and daily life has increased. With increasingly complex tasks and interaction in different environments including humans, robots are required a higher level of autonomy for efficient deliberation. Task planning is a key element of deliberation. It combines elementary operations into a structured plan to satisfy a prescribed goal, given specifications on the robot and the environment. In this manuscript, we present a survey on recent advances in the application of logic programming to the problem of task planning. Logic programming offers several advantages compared to other approaches, including greater expressivity and interpretability which may aid in the development of safe and reliable robots. We analyze different planners and their suitability for specific robotic applications, based on expressivity in domain representation, computational efficiency and software implementation. In this way, we support the robotic designer in choosing the best tool for his application

Integration of Logic and Probability in Terminological and Inductive Reasoning

This thesis deals with Statistical Relational Learning (SRL), a research area combining principles and ideas from three important subfields of Artificial Intelligence: machine learn- ing, knowledge representation and reasoning on uncertainty. Machine learning is the study of systems that improve their behavior over time with experience; the learning process typi- cally involves a search through various generalizations of the examples, in order to discover regularities or classification rules. A wide variety of machine learning techniques have been developed in the past fifty years, most of which used propositional logic as a (limited) represen- tation language. Recently, more expressive knowledge representations have been considered, to cope with a variable number of entities as well as the relationships that hold amongst them. These representations are mostly based on logic that, however, has limitations when reason- ing on uncertain domains. These limitations have been lifted allowing a multitude of different formalisms combining probabilistic reasoning with logics, databases or logic programming, where probability theory provides a formal basis for reasoning on uncertainty. In this thesis we consider in particular the proposals for integrating probability in Logic Programming, since the resulting probabilistic logic programming languages present very in- teresting computational properties. In Probabilistic Logic Programming, the so-called "dis- tribution semantics" has gained a wide popularity. This semantics was introduced for the PRISM language (1995) but is shared by many other languages: Independent Choice Logic, Stochastic Logic Programs, CP-logic, ProbLog and Logic Programs with Annotated Disjunc- tions (LPADs). A program in one of these languages defines a probability distribution over normal logic programs called worlds. This distribution is then extended to queries and the probability of a query is obtained by marginalizing the joint distribution of the query and the programs. The languages following the distribution semantics differ in the way they define the distribution over logic programs. The first part of this dissertation presents techniques for learning probabilistic logic pro- grams under the distribution semantics. Two problems are considered: parameter learning and structure learning, that is, the problems of inferring values for the parameters or both the structure and the parameters of the program from data. This work contributes an algorithm for parameter learning, EMBLEM, and two algorithms for structure learning (SLIPCASE and SLIPCOVER) of probabilistic logic programs (in particular LPADs). EMBLEM is based on the Expectation Maximization approach and computes the expectations directly on the Binary De- cision Diagrams that are built for inference. SLIPCASE performs a beam search in the space of LPADs while SLIPCOVER performs a beam search in the space of probabilistic clauses and a greedy search in the space of LPADs, improving SLIPCASE performance. All learning approaches have been evaluated in several relational real-world domains. The second part of the thesis concerns the field of Probabilistic Description Logics, where we consider a logical framework suitable for the Semantic Web. Description Logics (DL) are a family of formalisms for representing knowledge. Research in the field of knowledge repre- sentation and reasoning is usually focused on methods for providing high-level descriptions of the world that can be effectively used to build intelligent applications. Description Logics have been especially effective as the representation language for for- mal ontologies. Ontologies model a domain with the definition of concepts and their properties and relations. Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, etc. They should also allow to ask questions about the concepts and in- stances described, through inference procedures. Recently, the issue of representing uncertain information in these domains has led to probabilistic extensions of DLs. The contribution of this dissertation is twofold: (1) a new semantics for the Description Logic SHOIN(D) , based on the distribution semantics for probabilistic logic programs, which embeds probability; (2) a probabilistic reasoner for computing the probability of queries from uncertain knowledge bases following this semantics. The explanations of queries are encoded in Binary Decision Diagrams, with the same technique employed in the learning systems de- veloped for LPADs. This approach has been evaluated on a real-world probabilistic ontology

Distributional logic programming for Bayesian knowledge representation

We present a formalism for combining logic programming and its flavour of nondeterminism with probabilistic reasoning. In particular, we focus on representing prior knowledge for Bayesian inference. Distributional logic programming (Dlp), is considered in the context of a class of generative probabilistic languages. A characterisation based on probabilistic paths which can play a central role in clausal probabilistic reasoning is presented. We illustrate how the characterisation can be utilised to clarify derived distributions with regards to mixing the logical and probabilistic constituents of generative languages. We use this operational characterisation to define a class of programs that exhibit probabilistic determinism. We show how Dlp can be used to define generative priors over statistical model spaces. For example, a single program can generate all possible Bayesian networks having N nodes while at the same time it defines a prior that penalises networks with large families. Two classes of statistical models are considered: Bayesian networks and classification and regression trees. Finally we discuss: (1) a Metropolis–Hastings algorithm that can take advantage of the defined priors and the probabilistic choice points in the prior programs and (2) its application to real-world machine learning tasks

Declarative Rules for Annotated Expert Knowledge in Change Management

In this paper, we use declarative and domain-specific languages for representing expert knowledge in the field of change management in organisational psychology. Expert rules obtained in practical case studies are represented as declarative rules in a deductive database. The expert rules are annotated by information describing their provenance and confidence. Additional provenance information for the whole - or parts of the - rule base can be given by ontologies. Deductive databases allow for declaratively defining the semantics of the expert knowledge with rules; the evaluation of the rules can be optimised and the inference mechanisms could be changed, since they are specified in an abstract way. As the logical syntax of rules had been a problem in previous applications of deductive databases, we use specially designed domain-specific languages to make the rule syntax easier for non-programmers. The semantics of the whole knowledge base is declarative. The rules are written declaratively in an extension datalogs of the well-known deductive database language datalog on the data level, and additional datalogs rules can configure the processing of the annotated rules and the ontologies

08091 Abstracts Collection -- Logic and Probability for Scene Interpretation

From 25.2.2008 to Friday 29.2.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08091 ``Logic and Probability for Scene Interpretation\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper

Movement Analytics: Current Status, Application to Manufacturing, and Future Prospects from an AI Perspective

Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications

Domain-specific languages in Prolog for declarative expert knowledge in rules and ontologies

Declarative if–then rules have proven very useful in many applications of expert sys- tems. They can be managed in deductive databases and evaluated using the well-known forward-chaining approach. For domain-experts, however, the syntax of rules becomes complicated quickly, and already many different knowledge representation formalisms ex- ist. Expert knowledge is often acquired in story form using interviews. In this paper, we discuss its representation by defining domain-specific languages (Dsls) for declarative ex- pert rules. They can be embedded in Prolog systems in internal Dsls using term expan- sion and as external Dsls using definite clause grammars and quasi-quotations – for more sophisticated syntaxes. Based on the declarative rules and the integration with the Prolog-based deductive database system DDbase, multiple rules acquired in practical case studies can be combined, compared, graphically analysed by domain-experts, and evaluated, resulting in an extensi- ble system for expert knowledge. As a result, the actual modeling Dsl becomes executable; the declarative forward-chaining evaluation of deductive databases can be understood by the domain experts. Our Dsl for rules can be further improved by integrating ontologies and rule annotations