Inductive Logic Programming

The 18th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming was held in Prague, September 10–12, 2008. ILP returned to Prague after 11 years, and it is tempting to look at how the topics of interest have evolved during that time. The ILP community clearly continues to cherish its beloved ?rst-order logic representation framework. This is legitimate, as the work presented at ILP 2008 demonstrated that there is still room for both extending established ILP approaches (such as inverse entailment) and exploring novel logic induction frameworks (such as brave induction). Besides the topics lending ILP research its unique focus, we were glad to see in this year’s proceedings a good n- ber of papers contributing to areas such as statistical relational learning, graph mining, or the semantic web. To help open ILP to more mainstream research areas, the conference featured three excellent invited talks from the domains of the semantic web (Frank van Harmelen), bioinformatics (Mark Craven) and cognitive sciences (Josh Tenenbaum). We deliberately looked for speakers who are not directly involved in ILP research. We further invited a tutorial on stat- tical relational learning (Kristian Kersting) to meet the strong demand to have the topic presented from the ILP perspective. Lastly, Stefano Bertolo from the European Commission was invited to give a talk on the ideal niches for ILP in the current EU-supported research on intelligent content and semantics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, ILP 2008, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2008.

The 20 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 5 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 46 initial submissions. All current topics in inductive logic programming are covered, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to advanced applications. The papers present original results in the first-order logic representation framework, explore novel logic induction frameworks, and address also new areas such as statistical relational learning, graph mining, or the semantic Web.