A Description Logic for Analogical Reasoning

A Description Logic for Analogical Reasoning

Steven Schockaert, Yazmin Ibanez-Garcia, Victor Gutierrez-Basulto

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2040-2046. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/281

Ontologies formalise how the concepts from a given domain are interrelated. Despite their clear potential as a backbone for explainable AI, existing ontologies tend to be highly incomplete, which acts as a significant barrier to their more widespread adoption. To mitigate this issue, we present a mechanism to infer plausible missing knowledge, which relies on reasoning by analogy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies analogical reasoning within the setting of description logic ontologies. After showing that the standard formalisation of analogical proportion has important limitations in this setting, we introduce an alternative semantics based on bijective mappings between sets of features. We then analyse the properties of analogies under the proposed semantics, and show among others how it enables two plausible inference patterns: rule translation and rule extrapolation.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Common-Sense Reasoning
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics and Ontologies