Inductive Synthesis of Recursive Logic Programs: Achievements and Prospects

The synthesis of recursive logic programs from incomplete information, such as input/output examples, is a challenging subfield both of ILP (Inductive Logic Programming) and of the synthesis (in general) of logic programs from formal specifications. We first survey past and present achievements, focusing on the techniques that mostly aim at the synthesis of recursive logic programs, dispensing thus with many more general ILP techniques that can also induce non-recursive hypotheses. Then we analyze the prospects of all inductive techniques in this task, whether they are tailored or not for the synthesis of recursive programs, investigating their applicability to software engineering and to knowledge acquisition and discovery