PLP-2020: The Seventh Workshop on Probabilistic Logic Programming ----------------------------------------------------------------

A workshop of 36th International Conference on Logic Programming September 18-24, 2020, virtual conference http://stoics.org.uk/plp/plp2020/

Deadline for submissions: Aug, 1st 2020

**** COVID-19: Due to the ongoing pandemic, the workshop will be held online. ****

Overview ----- Probabilistic logic programming (PLP) approaches have received much attention in this century. They address the need to reason about relational domains under uncertainty arising in a variety of application domains, such as bioinformatics, the semantic web, robotics, and many more. Developments in PLP include new languages that combine logic programming with probability theory, as well as algorithms that operate over programs in these formalisms.

The workshop encompasses all aspects of combining logic, algorithms, programming and probability.

PLP is part of a wider current interest in probabilistic programming. By promoting probabilities as explicit programming constructs, inference, parameter estimation and learning algorithms can be ran over programs which represent highly structured probability spaces. Due to logic programming's strong theoretical underpinnings, PLP is one of the more disciplined areas of probabilistic programming. It builds upon and benefits from the large body of existing work in logic programming, both in semantics and implementation, but also presents new challenges to the field. PLP reasoning often requires the evaluation of large number of possible states before any answers can be produced thus braking the sequential search model of traditional logic programs.

While PLP has already contributed a number of formalisms, systems and well understood and established results in: parameter estimation, tabling, marginal probabilities and Bayesian learning, many questions remain open in this exciting, expanding field in the intersection of AI, machine learning and statistics.

This workshop provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, presentation of results and preliminary work, in the following areas

* probabilistic logic programming formalisms * parameter estimation * statistical inference * implementations * structure learning * reasoning with uncertainty * constraint store approaches * stochastic and randomised algorithms * probabilistic knowledge representation and reasoning * constraints in statistical inference * applications, such as * * bioinformatics * * semantic web * * robotics * probabilistic graphical models * Bayesian learning * tabling for learning and stochastic inference * MCMC * stochastic search * labelled logic programs * integration of statistical software

The above list should be interpreted broadly and is by no means exhaustive.

Purpose ----- After six successful editions of this workshop at ICLP 2014 in Vienna, ICLP 2015 in Cork and ILP 2016 in London, at ILP 2017 in Orléans, at ILP 2018 in Ferrara, at ICLP 2019 in Las Cruces, PLP will be online this year and will be co-located with ICLP 2020. We hope that this encourages further collaboration between researchers in PLP and researchers working in other areas of ICLP.

Submissions ----- Submissions will be managed via EasyChair(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=plp2020). Contributions should be prepared in the LNCS style. A mixture of papers are sought including: new results, work in progress as well as technical summaries of recent substantial contributions. Papers presenting new results should be 6-15 pages in length. Work in progress and technical summaries can be shorter (2-5 pages). The workshop proceedings will clearly indicate the type of each paper.

At least one author of each accepted paper will be required to attend the workshop to present the contribution.

Publication ----- Informal proceedings will be made available electronically to attendees. They will also be for stored permanently in the form on CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/) or arXiv (https://arxiv.org). The proceedings will consist of clearly marked sections corresponding to the different types of submissions accepted.

Deadlines ----- Papers due: Aug, 1st 2020 Notification to authors: Sep, 1st 2020 Camera ready version due: Sep, 10th 2020 Workshop date: September 18-24, 2020 (the deadline for all dates is AOE)

Invited Speaker(s) ----- To be confirmed.

Organising Committee ----- Carmine Dodaro (University of Calabria, Italy) [co-chair] (dodaro@mat.unical.it) George Aristidis Elder (Queen Mary University of London, UK) [co-chair] (g.a.elder@qmul.ac.uk)

Program Committee ----- To be confirmed.