Actively Learning Concepts and Conjunctive Queries under ELr-Ontologies

Actively Learning Concepts and Conjunctive Queries under ELr-Ontologies

Maurice Funk, Jean Christoph Jung, Carsten Lutz

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1887-1893. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/260

We consider the problem to learn a concept or a query in the presence of an ontology formulated in the description logic ELr, in Angluin's framework of active learning that allows the learning algorithm to interactively query an oracle (such as a domain expert). We show that the following can be learned in polynomial time: (1) EL-concepts, (2) symmetry-free ELI-concepts, and (3) conjunctive queries (CQs) that are chordal, symmetry-free, and of bounded arity. In all cases, the learner can pose to the oracle membership queries based on ABoxes and equivalence queries that ask whether a given concept/query from the considered class is equivalent to the target. The restriction to bounded arity in (3) can be removed when we admit unrestricted CQs in equivalence queries. We also show that EL-concepts are not polynomial query learnable in the presence of ELI-ontologies.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics and Ontologies