Church refers to both a family of

LISP A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

-like ''

probabilistic programming Probabilistic programming (PP) is a programming paradigm in which probabilistic models are specified and inference for these models is performed automatically. It represents an attempt to unify probabilistic modeling and traditional general pur ...

languages'' for specifying arbitrary

probabilistic Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

programs, as well as a set of

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...

for performing probabilistic

inference Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in ...

in the

generative model In statistical classification, two main approaches are called the generative approach and the discriminative approach. These compute classifiers by different approaches, differing in the degree of statistical modelling. Terminology is inconsis ...

s those programs define. Church was originally developed at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

, primarily in the computational cognitive science group, run by

Joshua Tenenbaum Joshua Brett Tenenbaum (Josh Tenenbaum) is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to mathematical psychology and Bayesian cognitive science. According to the MacArt ...

. Several different inference algorithms and concrete languages are in existence, including Bher, MIT-Church, Cosh, Venture, and Anglican.

References

Nondeterministic programming languages Probabilistic software {{Compu-lang-stub