| Frontiers of
Inductive Logic Programming IJCAI'97 Workshop, 25 August 1997
Akihito Yamamoto
The IJCAI-97 workshop on Frontiers of
Inductive Logic Programming (FILP) was held on 25 August 1997 in Nagoya, Japan. There were
32 workshops in IJCAI-97 and the FILP workshop was given number W12. The organizers were
Luc De Raedt (chair), Saso Dzeroski, Koichi Furukawa, Fumio Mizoguchi and Stephen
Muggleton. The program committee members were Francesco Bergadano, Johannes Furnkranz,
David Page, and Ray Mooney, in addition to all of the organizers.
IJCAI is one of the best opportunities
to communicate directly with many people from various fields in Artificial Intelligence.
The FILP workshop was organized for two purposes : to widen the scope of ILP by
investigating its relations to neighboring fields, and to make ILP more accessible for
researchers from neighboring fields. In order to achieve the purposes, not only research
papers that make specific technical contributions but also position papers had been
solicited in the call for papers. Each technical paper had been required to clarify the
position of ILP with regard to the neighboring field(s) it addresses. In fact some
participants attended at another one. On the preceding day, a tutorial entitled
"Logic and Learning" had been given by Nada Lavraťc and Luc de Raedt in order
to provided a complete survey of learning in first order logic.
At the workshop 17 papers were
presented and 27 people attended from 10 countries (Europe, the United States, and Japan).
The program consisted of the presentation of the papers, an invited talk and a panel
discussion. To stimulate the workshop atmosphere, the program committee had decided that
they would deviate from the classical conference scheme in that the submitted papers were
categorized into three different types : technical papers, short papers, and position
papers. The subjects were theories, experimental analysis, as well as new proposals of
applying ILP to other fields.
Four papers were from Japan and one was
from the United States. The program committee had allowed the authors to present their
papers also in the ILP-97 Workshop held in Prague. Therefore participants from Japan and
the United States could know the research topics currently investigated in the European
ILP community, and could show their own results, too.
The invited talk was given by Koich
Furukawa from Keio University, entitled "Bottom-Up Inductive Logic Programming for
KDD - A Proposal of Datagol- ". KDD is the most attractive research area just
neighboring ILP. He proposed a new framework Dagol for KDD as an amalgamation of ILP and
DDB. The name Datagol is a ligature of Progol and Datalog. He pointed out that Datalog is
expressive as an representation language in ILP. He showed that bottom-up inference by a
theorem proving system MGTP is feasible for Datagol and that some optimizations can be
expected in its implementation. Because of the lack of function symbols, Datagol seems too
weak to apply to knowledge discovery in business areas or medical areas. But he suggested
such problems should be overcome by introducing a meta-predicate.
The panelist of the panel discussion
were Ray Mooney, Fumio Mizoguchi, Ashwin Srinivasan, and Peter Flach.
Because the workshop was programmed
just before the formal reception party of IJCAI-97, the schedule of was very tied. But we
think the purposes of the workshop were achieved and that it was very successful. The
program and the presented papers are available on the cite : http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac
.be/~lucdr/filp.html
Akihiro Yamamoto
Division of Electronics and Information
Engineering, and MemeMedia
Laboratory Hokkaido University
N 13 W 8, Kitaku, Sapporo 0608628,
Japan
Email : yamamoto@meme.hokudai.ac.jp
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