Kewen Wang

A Classification and Survey of Preference Handling Approaches in Nonmonotonic Reasoning

In recent years, there has been a large amount of disparate work concerning the representation and reasoning with qualitative preferential information by means of approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning. Given the variety of underlying systems, assumptions, motivations, and intuitions, it is difficult to compare or relate one approach with another. Here, we present an overview and classification for approaches to dealing with preference. A set of criteria for classifying approaches is given, followed by a set of desiderata that an approach might be expected to satisfy. A comprehensive set of approaches is subsequently given and classified with respect to these sets of underlying principles.

Semantic forgetting in answer set programming

The notion of forgetting, also known as variable elimination, has been investigated extensively in the context of classical logic, but less so in (nonmonotonic) logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. The few approaches that exist are based on syntactic modifications of a program at hand. In this paper, we establish a declarative theory of forgetting for disjunctive logic programs under answer set semantics that is fully based on semantic grounds. The suitability of this theory is justified by a number of desirable properties. In particular, one of our results shows that our notion of forgetting can be entirely captured by classical forgetting. We present several algorithms for computing a representation of the result of forgetting, and provide a characterization of the computational complexity of reasoning from a logic program under forgetting. As applications of our approach, we present a fairly general framework for resolving conflicts in inconsistent knowledge bases that are represented by disjunctive logic programs, and we show how the semantics of inheritance logic programs and update logic programs from the literature can be characterized through forgetting. The basic idea of the conflict resolution framework is to weaken the preferences of each agent by forgetting certain knowledge that causes inconsistency. In particular, we show how to use the notion of forgetting to provide an elegant solution for preference elicitation in disjunctive logic programming.

Forgetting for knowledge bases in DL-Lite

To support the reuse and combination of ontologies in Semantic Web applications, it is often necessary to obtain smaller ontologies from existing larger ontologies. In particular, applications may require the omission of certain terms, e. g., concept names and role names, from an ontology. However, the task of omitting terms from an ontology is challenging because the omission of some terms may affect the relationships between the remaining terms in complex ways. We present the first solution to the problem of omitting concepts and roles from knowledge bases of description logics (DLs) by adapting the technique of forgetting, previously used in other domains. Specifically, we first introduce a model-theoretic definition of forgetting for knowledge bases (both TBoxes and ABoxes) in DL-Lite

Forgetting concepts in DL-lite

^{\ensuremath{{\mathcal N}}}_{{bool}}

Alternating Fixpoint Theory for Logic Programs with Priority

, which is a non-trivial adaption of the standard definition for classical logic, and show that our model-based forgetting satisfies all major criteria of a rational forgetting operator, which in turn verifies the suitability of our model-based forgetting. We then introduce algorithms that implement forgetting operations in DL-Lite knowledge bases. We prove that the algorithms are correct with respect to the semantic definition of forgetting. We establish a general framework for defining and comparing different definitions of forgetting by introducing a parameterized family of forgetting operators called query-based forgetting operators. In this framework we identify three specific query-based forgetting operators and show that they form a hierarchy. In particular, we show that the model-based forgetting coincides with one of these query-based forgetting operators.

Combining Description Logic and Defeasible Logic for the semantic Web

To support the reuse and combination of ontologies in Semantic Web applications, it is often necessary to obtain smaller ontologies from existing larger ontologies. In particular, applications may require the omission of many terms, e.g., concept names and role names, from an ontology. However, the task of omitting terms from an ontology is challenging because the omission of some terms may affect the relationships between the remaining terms in complex ways. We present the first solution to this problem by adapting the technique of forgetting, previously used in other domains. Specifically, we present a semantic definition of forgetting for description logics in general, which generalizes the standard definition for classical logic. We then introduce algorithms that implement forgetting in both DL-Lite TBoxes and ABoxes, and in DL-Lite knowledge bases. We prove that the algorithms are correct with respect to the semantic definition of forgetting, and that they run in polynomial time.

Comparisons and computation of well-founded semantics for disjunctive logic programs

van Gelders alternating fixpoint theory has proven to be a very useful tool for unifying and characterizing various semantics for logic programs without priority. In this paper we propose an extension of van Gelders alternating fixpoint theory and show that it can be used as a general semantic framework for logic programs with priority. Specifically, we define three declarative and model-theoretic semantics in this framework for prioritied logic programs: prioritized answer sets, prioritized regular extensions and prioritized well-founded model. We show that all of these semantics are natural generalizations of the corresponding semantics for logic programs without priority. We also show that these semantics have some other desirable properties. In particular, they can handle conflicts caused indirectly by the priorities.

A semantic framework for preference handling in answer set programming

The importance of integrating rules and ontologies for the Semantic Web has been well addressed by many researchers. Defeasible Logic is a simple but efficient nonmonotonic language which can handle both defeasibility and priority. In this paper we propose a novel approach to combining Defeasible Logic with Description Logics by introducing the Description Defeasible Logic (DDL). DDL is similar to Defeasible Logic but it also contains queries to the Description Logic knowledge base. DDL allows nonmonotonic reasoning to be built on top of ontologies, and to a certain degree, allows ontologies to be built on top of nonmonotonic reasoning. We give some basic properties of DDL, one of which shows that DDL is a tractable language provided that the underlying Description Logic is tractable.

Forgetting in Managing Rules and Ontologies

Much work has been done on extending the well-founded semantics to general disjunctive logic programs and various approaches have been proposed. However, these semantics are different from each other and no consensus is reached about which semantics is the most intended. In this article, we look at disjunctive well-founded reasoning from different angles. We show that there is an intuitive form of the well-founded reasoning in disjunctive logic programming which can be characterized by slightly modifying some existing approaches to defining disjunctive well-founded semantics, including program transformations, argumentation, unfounded sets (and resolution-like procedure). By employing the techniques developed by Brass and Dix in their transformation-based approach, we also provide a bottom-up procedure for this semantics. The significance of our work is not only in clarifying the relationship among different approaches, but also shed some light on what is an intended well-founded semantics for disjunctive logic programs.

Concept and Role Forgetting in

We provide a semantic framework for preference handling in answer set programming. To this end, we introduce preference preserving consequence operators. The resulting fixpoint characterizations provide us with a uniform semantic framework for characterizing preference handling in existing approaches. Although our approach is extensible to other semantics by means of an alternating fixpoint theory, we focus here on the elaboration of preferences under answer set semantics. Alternatively, we show how these approaches can be characterized by the concept of order preservation. These uniform semantic characterizations provide us with new insights about inter-relationships and moreover about ways of implementation.