In many probabilistic first-order representation systems, inference is performed by "grounding"---i.e., mapping it to a propositional representation, and then performing propositional inference. With a large database of facts, groundings can be very large, making inference and learning computationally expensive. Here we present a first-order probabilistic language which is well-suited to approximate "local" grounding: every query @math can be approximately grounded with a small graph. The language is an extension of stochastic logic programs where inference is performed by a variant of personalized PageRank. Experimentally, we show that the approach performs well without weight learning on an entity resolution task; that supervised weight-learning improves accuracy; and that grounding time is independent of DB size. We also show that order-of-magnitude speedups are possible by parallelizing learning.
Stochastic logic programs (SLPs) are logic programs with parameterised clauses which define a log-linear distribution over refutations of goals. The log-linear distribution provides, by marginalisation, a distribution over variable bindings, allowing SLPs to compactly represent quite complex distributions. We analyse the fundamental statistical properties of SLPs addressing issues concerning infinite derivations, ‘unnormalised’ SLPs and impure SLPs. After detailing existing approaches to parameter estimation for log-linear models and their application to SLPs, we present a new algorithm called failure-adjusted maximisation (FAM). FAM is an instance of the EM algorithm that applies specifically to normalised SLPs and provides a closed-form for computing parameter updates within an iterative maximisation approach. We empirically show that FAM works on some small examples and discuss methods for applying it to bigger problems.