Automating the ilp setup task: converting user advice about specific examples into general background knowledge

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) provides an effective method of learning logical theories given a set of positive examples, a set of negative examples, a corpus of background knowledge, and specification of a search space (e.g., via mode definitions) from which to compose the theories. While specifying positive and negative examples is relatively straightforward, composing effective background knowledge and search-space definition requires detailed understanding of many aspects of the ILP process and limits the usability of ILP. We introduce two techniques to automate the use of ILP for a non-ILP expert. These techniques include automatic generation of background knowledge from user-supplied information in the form of a simple relevance language, used to describe important aspects of specific training examples, and an iterative-deepening-style search process.