Induction of First-Order Decision Lists: Results on Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs

摘要

This paper presents a method for inducing logic programs from examples thatlearns a new class of concepts called first-order decision lists, defined asordered lists of clauses each ending in a cut. The method, called FOIDL, isbased on FOIL (Quinlan, 1990) but employs intensional background knowledge andavoids the need for explicit negative examples. It is particularly useful forproblems that involve rules with specific exceptions, such as learning thepast-tense of English verbs, a task widely studied in the context of thesymbolic/connectionist debate. FOIDL is able to learn concise, accurateprograms for this problem from significantly fewer examples than previousmethods (both connectionist and symbolic).