This volume contains selected papers presented at the Eighth Logic Programming Conference, held in Tokyo, 1989. Various topics in logic programming are covered. The first paper is an invited talk by Prof. Donald Michie, Chief Scientist of the Turing Institute, entitled "Human and Machine Learning of Descriptive Concepts," and introduces various research results on learning obtained by his group. There are eleven further papers, organized into sections on reasoning, logic programming language, concurrent programming, knowledge programming, natural language processing, and applications. A paper on knowledge programming introduces a flexible and powerful tool for incorporating and organizing knowledge using hypermedia. Another paper presents the constraint logic programming language cu-Prolog, designed for combinatorial problems; the way cu-Prolog solves the constraints is based on program transformation.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Seventh Logic Programming Conference that took place in Tokyo, April 11-14, 1988. It is the successor to the previous conference proceedings published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volumes 221, 264 and 315. The book covers various aspects of logic programming such as foundations, programming languages/systems, concurrent programming, knowledge bases, applications of computer-aided reasoning and natural language processing. The papers on foundations present theoretical results on "narrowing," a proof strategy for proving properties of Prolog programs based on inductionless induction and several issues in nonmonotonic reasoning. Of special interest to mathematicians is the paper on computer-aided reasoning, which describes a system for assisting human reasoning. Natural language application papers treat the lexical analysis of Japanese sentences, a system that generates a summary of a given sentence and a new knowledge representation formalism suited for representing dynamic behavior by extending the frame system.

This volume contains most of the papers presented at the 6th Logic Programming Conference held in Tokyo, June 22-24, 1987. It is the successor of Lecture Notes in Computer Science volumes 221 and 264. The contents cover foundations, programming, architecture and applications. Topics of particular interest are constraint logic programming and parallelism. The effort to apply logic programming to large-scale realistic problems is another important subject of these proceedings.