SWISH: SWI-Prolog for Sharing

Recently, we see a new type of interfaces for programmers based on web technology. For example, JSFiddle, IPython Notebook and R-studio. Web technology enables cloud-based solutions, embedding in tutorial web pages, atractive rendering of results, web-scale cooperative development, etc. This article describes SWISH, a web front-end for Prolog. A public website exposes SWI-Prolog using SWISH, which is used to run small Prolog programs for demonstration, experimentation and education. We connected SWISH to the ClioPatria semantic web toolkit, where it allows for collaborative development of programs and queries related to a dataset as well as performing maintenance tasks on the running server and we embedded SWISH in the Learn Prolog Now! online Prolog book.Comment: International Workshop on User-Oriented Logic Programming (IULP 2015), co-located with the 31st International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2015), Proceedings of the International Workshop on User-Oriented Logic Programming (IULP 2015), Editors: Stefan Ellmauthaler and Claudia Schulz, pages 99-113, August 201

Probabilistic inference in SWI-Prolog

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) emerged as one of the most prominent approaches to cope with real-world domains. The distribution semantics is one of most used in PLP, as it is followed by many languages, such as Independent Choice Logic, PRISM, pD, Logic Programs with Annotated Disjunctions (LPADs) and ProbLog. A possible system that allows performing inference on LPADs is PITA, which transforms the input LPAD into a Prolog program containing calls to library predicates for handling Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). In particular, BDDs are used to compactly encode explanations for goals and efficiently compute their probability. However, PITA needs mode-directed tabling (also called tabling with answer subsumption), which has been implemented in SWI-Prolog only recently. This paper shows how SWI-Prolog has been extended to include correct answer subsumption and how the PITA transformation has been changed to use SWI-Prolog implementation

Well-Definedness and Efficient Inference for Probabilistic Logic Programming under the Distribution Semantics

The distribution semantics is one of the most prominent approaches for the combination of logic programming and probability theory. Many languages follow this semantics, such as Independent Choice Logic, PRISM, pD, Logic Programs with Annotated Disjunctions (LPADs) and ProbLog. When a program contains functions symbols, the distribution semantics is well-defined only if the set of explanations for a query is finite and so is each explanation. Well-definedness is usually either explicitly imposed or is achieved by severely limiting the class of allowed programs. In this paper we identify a larger class of programs for which the semantics is well-defined together with an efficient procedure for computing the probability of queries. Since LPADs offer the most general syntax, we present our results for them, but our results are applicable to all languages under the distribution semantics. We present the algorithm "Probabilistic Inference with Tabling and Answer subsumption" (PITA) that computes the probability of queries by transforming a probabilistic program into a normal program and then applying SLG resolution with answer subsumption. PITA has been implemented in XSB and tested on six domains: two with function symbols and four without. The execution times are compared with those of ProbLog, cplint and CVE. PITA was almost always able to solve larger problems in a shorter time, on domains with and without function symbols

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