Efficient θ-subsumption under Object Identity.pdfVIP

Efficient θ-subsumption under Object Identity Stefano Ferilli, Nicola Fanizzi, Nicola Di Mauro and Teresa M.A. Basile Dipartimento di Informatica ` Universita di Bari via E. Orabona, 4 - 70125 Bari - Italia {ferilli, fanizzi, nicodimauro, basile }@di.uniba.it Abstract. Efficiency of the first-order logic proof procedure is a major issue when deduction systems are to be used in real environments, both on their own and as a component of other systems (e.g., learning systems). Hence, the need of techniques that can speed up such a process. This paper proposes a proof procedure that works under the Object Identity assumption, and shows experimental results in support of its performance. Imposing the Object Identity bias does not limit expressive power, while turning out to be even more intuitive to the human way of thinking than the classical setting. 1 Introduction Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) aims at automatically learning logic programs that ex- plain (‘cover ’) a given set of positive examples while rejecting other negative ones. In this context, because of the implication relationship being undecidable in general [12], a cen- tral role is played by θ-subsumption, used to decide if a rule covers an example as well as to obtain the reduction of clauses. Completeness and consistency checks of new clauses (or clause refinements) against given examples, in particular, require a large amount of subsump- tion tests. Hence, the availability of an efficient θ-subsumption algorithm heavily affects the overall efficiency of ILP learning systems. Given C and D clauses, C θ-subsumes D iff there is