Pairwise Markov logic

For many tasks in fields like computer vision, computational biology and information extraction, popular probabilistic inference methods have been devised mainly for propositional models that contain only unary and pairwise clique potentials. In contrast, statistical relational approaches typically do not restrict a model's representational power and use high-order potentials to capture the rich structure of relational domains. This paper aims to bring both worlds closer together. We introduce pairwise Markov Logic, a subset of Markov Logic where each formula contains at most two atoms. We show that every non-pairwise Markov Logic Network (MLN) can be transformed or 'reduced' to a pairwise MLN. Thus, existing, highly efficient probabilistic inference methods can be employed for pairwise MLNs without the overhead of devising or implementing high-order variants. Experiments on two relational datasets confirm the usefulness of this reduction approach.