Iterative Learning of Answer Set Programs from Context Dependent Examples

Abstract: In recent years, several frameworks and systems have been proposed that extend Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to the Answer Set Programming (ASP) paradigm. In ILP, examples must all be explained by a hypothesis together with a given background knowledge. In existing systems, the background knowledge is the same for all examples; however, examples may be context-dependent. This means that some examples should be explained in the context of some information, whereas others should be explained in different contexts. In this paper, we capture this notion and present a context-dependent extension of the Learning from Ordered Answer Sets framework. In this extension, contexts can be used to further structure the background knowledge. We then propose a new iterative algorithm, ILASP2i, which exploits this feature to scale up the existing ILASP2 system to learning tasks with large numbers of examples. We demonstrate the gain in scalability by applying both algorithms to various learning tasks. Our results show that, compared to ILASP2, the newly proposed ILASP2i system can be two orders of magnitude faster and use two orders of magnitude less memory, whilst preserving the same average accuracy. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.