One of the key open questions within arti?cial intelligence is how to combine probability and logic with learning. This question is getting an increased - tentioninseveraldisciplinessuchasknowledgerepresentation, reasoningabout uncertainty, data mining, and machine learning simulateously, resulting in the newlyemergingsub?eldknownasstatisticalrelationallearningandprobabil- ticinductivelogicprogramming.Amajordriving forceisthe explosivegrowth in the amount of heterogeneous data that is being collected in the business and scienti?c world. Example domains include bioinformatics, chemoinform- ics, transportation systems, communication networks, social network analysis, linkanalysis, robotics, amongothers.Thestructuresencounteredcanbeass- pleassequencesandtrees(suchasthosearisinginproteinsecondarystructure predictionandnaturallanguageparsing)orascomplexascitationgraphs, the WorldWideWeb, andrelationaldatabases. This book providesan introduction to this ?eld with an emphasison those methods based on logic programming principles. The book is also the main resultofthesuccessfulEuropeanISTFETprojectno.FP6-508861onAppli- tionofProbabilisticInductiveLogicProgramming(APRILII,2004-2007).This projectwascoordinatedbytheAlbertLudwigsUniversityofFreiburg(Germany, Luc De Raedt) and the partners were Imperial College London (UK, Stephen MuggletonandMichaelSternberg), theHelsinkiInstituteofInformationTe- nology(Finland, HeikkiMannila), theUniversit adegliStudidiFlorence(Italy, PaoloFrasconi), andtheInstitutNationaldeRechercheenInformatiqueet- tomatiqueRocquencourt(France, FrancoisFages).Itwasconcernedwiththeory, implementationsandapplicationsofprobabilisticinductivelogicprogramming. Thisstructureisalsore?ectedinthebook. The book starts with an introductory chapter to "Probabilistic Inductive LogicProgramming"byDeRaedtandKersting.Inasecondpart, itprovidesa detailedoverviewofthemostimportantprobabilisticlogiclearningformalisms and systems. We are very pleased and proud that the scientists behind the key probabilistic inductive logic programming systems (also those developed outside the APRIL project) have kindly contributed a chapter providing an overviewoftheircontributions.Thisincludes: relationalsequencelearningte- niques (Kersting et al.), using kernels with logical representations (Frasconi andPasserini), MarkovLogic(Domingosetal.), the PRISMsystem (Satoand Kameya), CLP(BN)(SantosCostaetal.), BayesianLogicPrograms(Kersting andDeRaedt), andtheIndependentChoiceLogic(Poole).Thethirdpartthen provides a detailed account of some show-caseapplications of probabilistic - ductive logic programming, more speci?cally: in protein fold discovery (Chen et al.), haplotyping (Landwehr and Mielik] ainen) and systems biology (Fages andSoliman). The ?nal parttouchesupon sometheoreticalinvestigationsand VI Preface includes chaptersonbehavioralcomparisonof probabilisticlogicprogramming representations(MuggletonandChen)andamodel-theoreticexpressivityan- ysis(Jaege

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Inductive Logic Programming, ILP-96, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1996.
The 21 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book in revised version. Also included is the invited contribution "Inductive logic programming for natural language processing" by Raymond J. Mooney. Among the topics covered are natural language learning, drug design, NMR and ECG analysis, glaucoma diagnosis, efficiency measures for implementations and database interaction, program synthesis, proof encoding and learning in the absence of negative data, and least generalizations under implication ordering.