Abstract
Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming (PILP) systems extend ILP by allowing the world to be represented using probabilistic facts and rules, and by learning probabilistic theories that can be used to make predictions. However, such systems can be inefficient both due to the large search space inherited from the ILP algorithm and to the probabilistic evaluation needed whenever a new candidate theory is generated. To address the latter issue, this work introduces probability estimators aimed at improving the efficiency of PILP systems. An estimator can avoid the computational cost of probabilistic theory evaluation by providing an estimate of the value of the combination of two subtheories. Experiments are performed on three real-world datasets of different areas (biology, medical and web-based) and show that, by reducing the number of theories to be evaluated, the estimators can significantly shorten the execution time without losing probabilistic accuracy. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

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Abstract
Linear Meld is a concurrent forward-chaining linear logic programming language where logical facts can be asserted and retracted in a structured way. The database of facts is partitioned by the nodes of a graph structure which leads to parallelism if nodes are executed simultaneously. Communication arises whenever nodes send facts to other nodes by fact derivation. We present an overview of the virtual machine that we implemented to run Linear Meld on multicores, including code organization, thread management, rule execution and database organization for efficient fact insertion, lookup and deletion. Although our virtual machine is a work-in-progress, our results already show that Linear Meld is not only capable of scaling graph and machine learning programs but it also exhibits some interesting performance results when compared against other programming languages.

Abstract
This special issue of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) contains the regular papers accepted for presentation at the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2017), held in Melbourne, Australia from the 28th of August to the 1st of September, 2017. ICLP 2017 was colocated with the 23rd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2017) and the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017). Since the first conference held in Marseille in 1982, ICLP has been the premier international event for presenting research in logic programming. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017.

Abstract
Linear logic programs are challenging to implement efficiently because facts are asserted and retracted frequently. Implementation is made more difficult with the introduction of useful features such as rule priorities, which are used to specify the order of rule inference, and comprehensions or aggregates, which are mechanisms that make data iteration and gathering more intuitive. In this paper, we describe a compilation scheme for transforming linear logic programs enhanced with those features into efficient C++ code. Our experimental results show that compiled logic programs are less than one order of magnitude slower than hand-written C programs and much faster than interpreted languages such as Python.