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Heuristic Ranking in Tightly Coupled Probabilistic Description Logics

Thomas Lukasiewicz‚ Maria Vanina Martinez‚ Giorgio Orsi and Gerardo I. Simari

Abstract

The Semantic Web effort has steadily been gaining traction in the recent years. In particular,Web search companies are recently realizing that their products need to evolve towards having richer semantic search capabilities. Description logics (DLs) have been adopted as the formal underpinnings for Semantic Web languages used in describing ontologies. Reasoning under uncertainty has recently taken a leading role in this arena, given the nature of data found on the Web. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of the DL EL++ (which underlies the OWL2 EL profile) using Markov logic networks (MLNs) as probabilistic semantics. This extension is tightly coupled, meaning that probabilistic annotations in formulas can refer to objects in the ontology. We show that, even though the tightly coupled nature of our language means that many basic operations are data-intractable, we can leverage a sublanguage of MLNs that allows to rank the atomic consequences of an ontology relative to their probability values (called ranking queries) even when these values are not fully computed. We present an anytime algorithm to answer ranking queries, and provide an upper bound on the error that it incurs, as well as a criterion to decide when results are guaranteed to be correct.

Book Title
Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence‚ UAI 2012‚ Catalina Island‚ CA‚ USA‚ August 14−18‚ 2012
Editor
Nando de Freitas and Kevin P. Murphy
Pages
554−563
Publisher
AUAI Press
Year
2012