Guest editors’ introduction: special issue on inductive logic programming (ILP-2007)

Abstract

The 17th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming was held in Corvallis, Oregon, June 19 to 21, 2007, collocated with the ICML-2007, the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning. The conference program featured several invited talks, plenary paper presentations, poster presentations, and, jointly with ICML, a panel discussion on the future of structured machine learning. Much of the presented work has been included in the book Inductive Logic Programming: 17th International Conference, ILP 2007, Corvallis, OR, USA, June 19–21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, published by Springer Verlag as Volume 4894 of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. Like previous special issues on ILP conferences, this issue contains a small selection of articles describing work presented at the conference. In contrast to most previous years, the issue does not contain extended versions of papers that have already been included in the proceedings. Instead, authors were invited to extend their paper into a journal article and submit it to this journal, as an alternative to having the full conference paper included in the proceedings. Thus eliminating concerns about possible redundancy between the conference and journal publications, the conference chairs hoped to create a faster journal publication track than was otherwise possible. This special issue contains four articles. We selected three of these from the regular papers presented at the conference, based on their reviews and presentations. Reflecting the current emphasis of the field, all these papers address combining relational representations