Guest editors introduction: special issue on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2012)

Abstract

This issue contains selected papers from ILP 2012: the 22nd International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming held in Dubrovnik, Croatia on September 17–19, 2012. Out of the original 47 submissions to the conference, the authors of 8 selected peer-reviewed papers were invited to submit a revised and extended version for this special issue. As a result of an additional peer review adopting the journal criteria, 5 of these papers were finally accepted. The assorted papers demonstrate the vitality of current ILP research applied in challenging applications (here, object recognition), augmenting its logical foundations (metainterpretative learning, interpretation dynamics), and combined with extra-logical machinelearning techniques (neural networks, Bayes nets). In particular, the paper “Plane-based Object Categorization using Relational Learning” by R. Farid and C. Sammut, which won the best student-paper prize kindly sponsored by this journal, explores the hypothesis that relational description for classes of 3D objects can be built for robust object categorization in a real robotic application. Labelled sets of planes from 3D point clouds gathered during the RoboCup Rescue Robot competition are used as examples for an ILP system. The results show that ILP can be successfully applied to recognize objects encountered by a robot especially in an urban search and rescue environment. The article “Meta-interpretive Learning: Application to Grammatical Inference” by S.H. Muggleton, D. Lin, N. Pahlavi and A. Tamaddoni-Nezhad develops a framework in