Markov Logic: An Interface Layer for Artificial Intelligence

by Pedro Domingos

Most subfields of computer science have an interface layer via which applications communicate with the infrastructure, and this is key to their success (e.g., the Internet in networking, the relational model in databases, etc.). So far this interface layer has been missing in AI. First-order logic and probabilistic graphical models each have some of the necessary features, but a viable interface layer requires combining both. Markov logic is a powerful new language that accomplishes this by attaching weights to first-order formulas and treating them as templates for features of Markov random fields. Most statistical models in wide use are special cases of Markov logic, and first-order logic is its infinite-weight limit. Inference algorithms for Markov logic combine ideas from satisfiability, Markov chain Monte Carlo, belief propagation, and resolution. Learning algorithms make use of conditional likelihood, convex optimization, and inductive logic programming. Markov logic has been successfully applied to problems in information extraction and integration, natural language processing, robot mapping, social networks, computational biology, and others, and is the basis of the open-source Alchemy system. Table of Introduction / Markov Logic / Inference / Learning / Extensions / Applications / Conclusion

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

I'm a professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and the author of 2040 and The Master Algorithm. I'm a winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award and the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, two of the highest honors in data science and AI. I'm a Fellow of the AAAS and AAAI, and I've received an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an IBM Faculty Award, several best paper awards, and other distinctions. I received an undergraduate degree (1988) and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1992) from IST, in Lisbon, and an M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. I'm the author or co-author of over 200 technical publications in machine learning, data science, and other areas. I'm a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal, co-founder of the International Machine Learning Society, and past associate editor of JAIR. I was program co-chair of KDD-2003 and SRL-2009, and I've served on the program committees of AAAI, ICML, IJCAI, KDD, NIPS, SIGMOD, UAI, WWW, and others. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, Spectator, Scientific American, Wired, and others. I helped start the fields of statistical relational AI, data stream mining, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration, and influence maximization in social networks.