Evelina Lamma - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Evelina Lamma
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2009
In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of declarative paradigms... more In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of declarative paradigms for modeling and verifying process models. These paradigms provide an abstract and human understandable way of specifying constraints that must hold among activities executions rather than focusing on a specific procedural solution. Mining such declarative descriptions is still an open challenge. In this paper, we present a logic-based approach for tackling this problem. It relies on Inductive Logic Programming techniques and, in particular, on a modified version of the Inductive Constraint Logic algorithm. We investigate how, by properly tuning the learning algorithm, the approach can be adopted to mine models expressed in the ConDec notation, a graphical language for the declarative specification of business processes. Then, we sketch how such a mining framework has been concretely implemented as a ProM plug-in called DecMiner. We finally discuss the effectiveness of the approach by means of an example which shows the ability of the language to model concurrent activities and of DecMiner to learn such a model.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2010
The management of business processes is receiving much attention, since it can support significan... more The management of business processes is receiving much attention, since it can support significant efficiency improvements in organizations. One of the most interesting problems is the representation of process models in a language that allows to perform reasoning on it. Various knowledge-based languages have been lately developed for such a task and showed to have a high potential due to the advantages of these languages with respect to traditional graph-based notations. In this work we present an approach for the automatic discovery of knolwedge-based process models expressed by means of a probabilistic logic, starting from a set of process execution traces. The approach first uses the DPML algorithm [16] to extract a set of integrity constraints from a collection of traces. Then, the learned constraints are translated into Markov Logic formulas and the weights of each formula are tuned using the Alchemy system. The resulting theory allows to perform probabilistic classification of traces. We tested the proposed approach on a real database of university students' careers. The experiments show that the combination of DPML and Alchemy achieves better results than DPML alone.
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of declarative programming - PPDP '06, 2006
Although stemming from very different research areas, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Orien... more Although stemming from very different research areas, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. One of the common problems is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and specifications (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the goals of the user.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1992
Some basic notions of object-oriented programming such as objects, messages and inheritance are p... more Some basic notions of object-oriented programming such as objects, messages and inheritance are provided of a clean definition according to the logic programming paradigm. Objects are represented by logic theories, while inheritance mechanisms are expressed through meta-level axioms. The sending of a message is interpreted as a request for the proof of a formula. The main contribution of the paper
The Journal of Logic Programming, 1993
In this paper we discuss an extension of Partial Deduction in the framework of structured logic p... more In this paper we discuss an extension of Partial Deduction in the framework of structured logic programs. The class of programs we consider includes statically configured systems such as block-and inheritance-based systems, as well as more dynamic configurations which support hypothetical reasoning and viewpoints.
The Journal of Logic Programming, 1994
The research on modular logic programming has evolved along two di erent directions during the pa... more The research on modular logic programming has evolved along two di erent directions during the past decade. Various papers have focused primarily on the problems of programming-in-the-large. They have proposed module systems equipped with compositional operators for building programs as combinations of separate and independent components. Other proposals have instead concentrated on the problem of programming-in-the-small in an attempt to enrich logic programming with abstraction and scoping mechanisms available in other programming paradigms. The issues that arise in the two approaches are substantially di erent. The compositional operators of the former allow one to structure programs without any need to extend the theory of Horn clauses. The scoping and abstraction mechanisms of the latter are modeled in terms of the logical connectives of extended logic languages. In this paper we provide a uniform reconstruction of the above approaches and we show, wherever this is possible, how the object-level logical connectives of the latter can be mapped onto the compositional operators of the former.
Although stemming from very difierent research areas, Multi- Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Orie... more Although stemming from very difierent research areas, Multi- Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. A common problem is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and speciflcations (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the user's goals. In previous publications, we developed a framework, SCIFF, for the au- tomatic veriflcation of compliance of agents to protocols. The framework includes a language based on abductive logic programming and on con- straint logic programming for formally deflning the social rules. Suit- able proof-procedures to check on-the-∞y and a-priori the compliance of agents to protocols have been deflned. Building on our experience in the MAS area, in this paper we make a flrst step towards the formal veriflcation of web services conformance to chore- ographies in Abductive Logic Programming...
Journal of Logic Programming - J LOGIC PROGRAM, 1999
Constraint Logic Programming solvers on finite domains (CLP(FD) solvers) use constraints to prune... more Constraint Logic Programming solvers on finite domains (CLP(FD) solvers) use constraints to prune those combinations of assignments which cannot appear in any consistent solution. There are applications, such as temporal reasoning or scheduling, requiring some form of qualitative reasoning where constraints can be changed (restricted) during the computation or even chosen when disjunction occurs. We embed in a (CLP(FD) solver the concept of constraints as first class objects. In the extended language, variables range over finite domains of objects (e.g., integers) and relation variables range over finite domains of relation symbols. We define operations and constraints on the two sorts of variables and one constraint linking the two. We first present the extension as a general framework, then we propose two specializations on finite domains of integers and of sets. Programming examples are given, showing the advantages of the extension proposed from both a knowledge representation a...
Information Sciences - ISCI, 1999
We propose an approach for the integration of abduction and induction in Logic Programming. We de... more We propose an approach for the integration of abduction and induction in Logic Programming. We define an Abductive Learning Problem as an extended Inductive Logic Programming problem where both the background and target theories are abductive theories and where abductive derivability is used as the coverage relation instead of deductive derivability. The two main benefits of this integration are the possibility of learning in presence of incomplete knowledge and the increased expressive power of the background and target theories. We present the system LAP (Learning Abductive Programs) that is able to solve this extended learning problem and we describe, by means of examples, four different learning tasks that can be performed by the system: learning from incomplete knowledge, learning rules with exceptions, learning from integrity constraints and learning recursive predicates.
Google, Inc. (search). ...
The focus of this work is on the interactions among (possibly heterogeneous) agents that form an ... more The focus of this work is on the interactions among (possibly heterogeneous) agents that form an open society, and on the definition of a computational logic-based architecture for agent interaction. We propose a model where the society defines the allowed interaction protocols, which determine the “socially” allowed agent interaction patterns. The semantics of protocols can be defined by means of social integrity constraints. The main advantages of this approach are in the design of societies of agents, and in the possibility to detect undesirable behavior. In the paper, we present the model for societies ruled by protocols expressed as integrity constraints, and its declarative semantics. A sketch of the operational counterpart is also given.
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 2005
In classical CLP(FD) systems, domains of variables are completely known at the beginning of the c... more In classical CLP(FD) systems, domains of variables are completely known at the beginning of the constraint propagation process. However, in systems interacting with an external environment, acquiring the whole domains of variables before the beginning of constraint propagation may cause waste of computation time, or even obsolescence of the acquired data at the time of use.
Theoretical Computer Science, 1997
We provide a simple formulation of a framework where some extensions of logic programming with no... more We provide a simple formulation of a framework where some extensions of logic programming with non-monotonic reasoning are treated uniformly, namely two kinds of negation and abduction. The resulting semantics is purely model-theoretic, and gives meaning to any noncontradictory abductive logic program. Moreover, it embeds and generalizes some existing semantics which deal with negation and abduction. The framework is equipped with a correct top-down proof procedure.
The Computer Journal, 2004
We present a system for measuring the Function Point software metric from specifications expresse... more We present a system for measuring the Function Point software metric from specifications expressed in the form of an Entity Relationship (ER) diagram and a Data Flow Diagram (DFD). As a first step towards the implementation of the system, the informal Function Point counting rules have been translated into rigorous rules expressing properties of the ER-DFD. Prolog was chosen for the implementation because of its declarativity and maintainability. Thanks to its relational representation, it was possible to directly represent the input ER-DFD with Prolog facts. Declarativity allowed a straightforward translation of the rigorous rules into code and a quick implementation of a working prototype. Finally, maintainability was a primary concern since the Function Point counting method is continually evolving.
Software: Practice and Experience, 1998
In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating Arti cial Intelligence (AI) and Oper... more In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating Arti cial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques for solving the Crew Rostering Problem (CRP). CRP calls for the optimal sequencing of a given set of duties into rosters satisfying a set of constraints. The optimality criterion requires the minimization of the number of crews needed to cover the duties. This kind of problem has been traditionally solved with OR techniques. In recent years, a new programming paradigm based on Logic Programming, named Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), has been successfully used for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. CLP maintains all the advantages of Logic Programming such as declarativeness, non-determinism and an incremental style of programming, while overcoming its limitations, mainly due to the ine ciency in exploring the search space. CLP achieves good results on hard combinatorial optimization problems which, however, are not comparable with those achieved by OR approaches. Therefore, we integrate both techniques in order to design an e ective heuristic algorithm for CRP which fully exploits the advantages of the two methodologies: on the one hand, we maintain the declarativeness of CLP, its ease of representing knowledge and its rapid prototyping; on the other hand, we inherit from OR some e cient procedures based on a mathematical approach to the problem. Finally, we compare the results we achieved by means of the integration with those obtained by a pure OR approach, showing that AI and OR techniques for hard combinatorial optimization problems can be e ectively integrated.
Software: Practice and Experience, 1991
By using practical examples, this paper outlines the power of reflection mechanisms for logic pro... more By using practical examples, this paper outlines the power of reflection mechanisms for logic programming systems in the domain of knowledge structuring. In particular, it presents an extension of Prolog, where separate databases can be handled as first-class objects. Different forms of database combination such as inheritance and dynamic context extension/contraction are specified and implemented in a dynamic and flexible way through reflection. The main aim is to broaden the application area of logic programming to encompass most of the paradigms needed by systems that use artificial intelligence techniques. Practical results presented in the paper show that logic programs that use reflection can be shorter, more readable and efficient than those using more conventional full meta-interpretation techniques. Full metainterpretation, however, is more general than reflection.
New Generation Computing, 2003
Abstract A huge amount of data is daily collected from clinical microbiology laboratories. These ... more Abstract A huge amount of data is daily collected from clinical microbiology laboratories. These data concern the resistance or susceptibility of bacteria to tested antibiotics. Almost all microbiology laboratories follow standard antibiotic testing guidelines which suggest ...
New Generation Computing, 1992
We present a compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs, where the composition of... more We present a compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs, where the composition of programs is modelled by the composition of the admissible Herbrand models of the programs. An Herbrand model is admissible if it is supported by the assumption of a set of hypotheses. On one hand, the hypotheses supporting a model correspond to an open interpretation of the program
Journal of Logic and Computation, 1993
ABSTRACT
Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 1996
ABSTRACT
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2009
In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of declarative paradigms... more In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of declarative paradigms for modeling and verifying process models. These paradigms provide an abstract and human understandable way of specifying constraints that must hold among activities executions rather than focusing on a specific procedural solution. Mining such declarative descriptions is still an open challenge. In this paper, we present a logic-based approach for tackling this problem. It relies on Inductive Logic Programming techniques and, in particular, on a modified version of the Inductive Constraint Logic algorithm. We investigate how, by properly tuning the learning algorithm, the approach can be adopted to mine models expressed in the ConDec notation, a graphical language for the declarative specification of business processes. Then, we sketch how such a mining framework has been concretely implemented as a ProM plug-in called DecMiner. We finally discuss the effectiveness of the approach by means of an example which shows the ability of the language to model concurrent activities and of DecMiner to learn such a model.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2010
The management of business processes is receiving much attention, since it can support significan... more The management of business processes is receiving much attention, since it can support significant efficiency improvements in organizations. One of the most interesting problems is the representation of process models in a language that allows to perform reasoning on it. Various knowledge-based languages have been lately developed for such a task and showed to have a high potential due to the advantages of these languages with respect to traditional graph-based notations. In this work we present an approach for the automatic discovery of knolwedge-based process models expressed by means of a probabilistic logic, starting from a set of process execution traces. The approach first uses the DPML algorithm [16] to extract a set of integrity constraints from a collection of traces. Then, the learned constraints are translated into Markov Logic formulas and the weights of each formula are tuned using the Alchemy system. The resulting theory allows to perform probabilistic classification of traces. We tested the proposed approach on a real database of university students' careers. The experiments show that the combination of DPML and Alchemy achieves better results than DPML alone.
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of declarative programming - PPDP '06, 2006
Although stemming from very different research areas, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Orien... more Although stemming from very different research areas, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. One of the common problems is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and specifications (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the goals of the user.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1992
Some basic notions of object-oriented programming such as objects, messages and inheritance are p... more Some basic notions of object-oriented programming such as objects, messages and inheritance are provided of a clean definition according to the logic programming paradigm. Objects are represented by logic theories, while inheritance mechanisms are expressed through meta-level axioms. The sending of a message is interpreted as a request for the proof of a formula. The main contribution of the paper
The Journal of Logic Programming, 1993
In this paper we discuss an extension of Partial Deduction in the framework of structured logic p... more In this paper we discuss an extension of Partial Deduction in the framework of structured logic programs. The class of programs we consider includes statically configured systems such as block-and inheritance-based systems, as well as more dynamic configurations which support hypothetical reasoning and viewpoints.
The Journal of Logic Programming, 1994
The research on modular logic programming has evolved along two di erent directions during the pa... more The research on modular logic programming has evolved along two di erent directions during the past decade. Various papers have focused primarily on the problems of programming-in-the-large. They have proposed module systems equipped with compositional operators for building programs as combinations of separate and independent components. Other proposals have instead concentrated on the problem of programming-in-the-small in an attempt to enrich logic programming with abstraction and scoping mechanisms available in other programming paradigms. The issues that arise in the two approaches are substantially di erent. The compositional operators of the former allow one to structure programs without any need to extend the theory of Horn clauses. The scoping and abstraction mechanisms of the latter are modeled in terms of the logical connectives of extended logic languages. In this paper we provide a uniform reconstruction of the above approaches and we show, wherever this is possible, how the object-level logical connectives of the latter can be mapped onto the compositional operators of the former.
Although stemming from very difierent research areas, Multi- Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Orie... more Although stemming from very difierent research areas, Multi- Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. A common problem is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and speciflcations (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the user's goals. In previous publications, we developed a framework, SCIFF, for the au- tomatic veriflcation of compliance of agents to protocols. The framework includes a language based on abductive logic programming and on con- straint logic programming for formally deflning the social rules. Suit- able proof-procedures to check on-the-∞y and a-priori the compliance of agents to protocols have been deflned. Building on our experience in the MAS area, in this paper we make a flrst step towards the formal veriflcation of web services conformance to chore- ographies in Abductive Logic Programming...
Journal of Logic Programming - J LOGIC PROGRAM, 1999
Constraint Logic Programming solvers on finite domains (CLP(FD) solvers) use constraints to prune... more Constraint Logic Programming solvers on finite domains (CLP(FD) solvers) use constraints to prune those combinations of assignments which cannot appear in any consistent solution. There are applications, such as temporal reasoning or scheduling, requiring some form of qualitative reasoning where constraints can be changed (restricted) during the computation or even chosen when disjunction occurs. We embed in a (CLP(FD) solver the concept of constraints as first class objects. In the extended language, variables range over finite domains of objects (e.g., integers) and relation variables range over finite domains of relation symbols. We define operations and constraints on the two sorts of variables and one constraint linking the two. We first present the extension as a general framework, then we propose two specializations on finite domains of integers and of sets. Programming examples are given, showing the advantages of the extension proposed from both a knowledge representation a...
Information Sciences - ISCI, 1999
We propose an approach for the integration of abduction and induction in Logic Programming. We de... more We propose an approach for the integration of abduction and induction in Logic Programming. We define an Abductive Learning Problem as an extended Inductive Logic Programming problem where both the background and target theories are abductive theories and where abductive derivability is used as the coverage relation instead of deductive derivability. The two main benefits of this integration are the possibility of learning in presence of incomplete knowledge and the increased expressive power of the background and target theories. We present the system LAP (Learning Abductive Programs) that is able to solve this extended learning problem and we describe, by means of examples, four different learning tasks that can be performed by the system: learning from incomplete knowledge, learning rules with exceptions, learning from integrity constraints and learning recursive predicates.
Google, Inc. (search). ...
The focus of this work is on the interactions among (possibly heterogeneous) agents that form an ... more The focus of this work is on the interactions among (possibly heterogeneous) agents that form an open society, and on the definition of a computational logic-based architecture for agent interaction. We propose a model where the society defines the allowed interaction protocols, which determine the “socially” allowed agent interaction patterns. The semantics of protocols can be defined by means of social integrity constraints. The main advantages of this approach are in the design of societies of agents, and in the possibility to detect undesirable behavior. In the paper, we present the model for societies ruled by protocols expressed as integrity constraints, and its declarative semantics. A sketch of the operational counterpart is also given.
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 2005
In classical CLP(FD) systems, domains of variables are completely known at the beginning of the c... more In classical CLP(FD) systems, domains of variables are completely known at the beginning of the constraint propagation process. However, in systems interacting with an external environment, acquiring the whole domains of variables before the beginning of constraint propagation may cause waste of computation time, or even obsolescence of the acquired data at the time of use.
Theoretical Computer Science, 1997
We provide a simple formulation of a framework where some extensions of logic programming with no... more We provide a simple formulation of a framework where some extensions of logic programming with non-monotonic reasoning are treated uniformly, namely two kinds of negation and abduction. The resulting semantics is purely model-theoretic, and gives meaning to any noncontradictory abductive logic program. Moreover, it embeds and generalizes some existing semantics which deal with negation and abduction. The framework is equipped with a correct top-down proof procedure.
The Computer Journal, 2004
We present a system for measuring the Function Point software metric from specifications expresse... more We present a system for measuring the Function Point software metric from specifications expressed in the form of an Entity Relationship (ER) diagram and a Data Flow Diagram (DFD). As a first step towards the implementation of the system, the informal Function Point counting rules have been translated into rigorous rules expressing properties of the ER-DFD. Prolog was chosen for the implementation because of its declarativity and maintainability. Thanks to its relational representation, it was possible to directly represent the input ER-DFD with Prolog facts. Declarativity allowed a straightforward translation of the rigorous rules into code and a quick implementation of a working prototype. Finally, maintainability was a primary concern since the Function Point counting method is continually evolving.
Software: Practice and Experience, 1998
In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating Arti cial Intelligence (AI) and Oper... more In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating Arti cial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques for solving the Crew Rostering Problem (CRP). CRP calls for the optimal sequencing of a given set of duties into rosters satisfying a set of constraints. The optimality criterion requires the minimization of the number of crews needed to cover the duties. This kind of problem has been traditionally solved with OR techniques. In recent years, a new programming paradigm based on Logic Programming, named Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), has been successfully used for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. CLP maintains all the advantages of Logic Programming such as declarativeness, non-determinism and an incremental style of programming, while overcoming its limitations, mainly due to the ine ciency in exploring the search space. CLP achieves good results on hard combinatorial optimization problems which, however, are not comparable with those achieved by OR approaches. Therefore, we integrate both techniques in order to design an e ective heuristic algorithm for CRP which fully exploits the advantages of the two methodologies: on the one hand, we maintain the declarativeness of CLP, its ease of representing knowledge and its rapid prototyping; on the other hand, we inherit from OR some e cient procedures based on a mathematical approach to the problem. Finally, we compare the results we achieved by means of the integration with those obtained by a pure OR approach, showing that AI and OR techniques for hard combinatorial optimization problems can be e ectively integrated.
Software: Practice and Experience, 1991
By using practical examples, this paper outlines the power of reflection mechanisms for logic pro... more By using practical examples, this paper outlines the power of reflection mechanisms for logic programming systems in the domain of knowledge structuring. In particular, it presents an extension of Prolog, where separate databases can be handled as first-class objects. Different forms of database combination such as inheritance and dynamic context extension/contraction are specified and implemented in a dynamic and flexible way through reflection. The main aim is to broaden the application area of logic programming to encompass most of the paradigms needed by systems that use artificial intelligence techniques. Practical results presented in the paper show that logic programs that use reflection can be shorter, more readable and efficient than those using more conventional full meta-interpretation techniques. Full metainterpretation, however, is more general than reflection.
New Generation Computing, 2003
Abstract A huge amount of data is daily collected from clinical microbiology laboratories. These ... more Abstract A huge amount of data is daily collected from clinical microbiology laboratories. These data concern the resistance or susceptibility of bacteria to tested antibiotics. Almost all microbiology laboratories follow standard antibiotic testing guidelines which suggest ...
New Generation Computing, 1992
We present a compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs, where the composition of... more We present a compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs, where the composition of programs is modelled by the composition of the admissible Herbrand models of the programs. An Herbrand model is admissible if it is supported by the assumption of a set of hypotheses. On one hand, the hypotheses supporting a model correspond to an open interpretation of the program
Journal of Logic and Computation, 1993
ABSTRACT
Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 1996
ABSTRACT