We develop, analyze, and evaluate a novel, supervised, specific-to-general
learner for a simple temporal logic and use the resulting algorithm to learn
visual event definitions from video sequences. First, we introduce a simple,
propositional, temporal, event-description language called AMA that is
sufficiently expressive to represent many events yet sufficiently restrictive
to support learning. We then give algorithms, along with lower and upper
complexity bounds, for the subsumption and generalization problems for AMA
formulas. We present a positive-examples--only specific-to-general learning
method based on these algorithms. We also present a polynomial-time--computable
``syntactic'' subsumption test that implies semantic subsumption without being
equivalent to it. A generalization algorithm based on syntactic subsumption can
be used in place of semantic generalization to improve the asymptotic
complexity of the resulting learning algorithm. Finally, we apply this
algorithm to the task of learning relational event definitions from video and
show that it yields definitions that are competitive with hand-coded ones