Enhancing Datalog Reasoning with Hypertree Decompositions

Enhancing Datalog Reasoning with Hypertree Decompositions

Xinyue Zhang, Pan Hu, Yavor Nenov, Ian Horrocks

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3383-3393. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/377

Datalog reasoning based on the seminaive evaluation strategy evaluates rules using traditional join plans, which often leads to redundancy and inefficiency in practice, especially when the rules are complex. Hypertree decompositions help identify efficient query plans and reduce similar redundancy in query answering. However, it is unclear how this can be applied to materialisation and incremental reasoning with recursive Datalog programs. Moreover, hypertree decompositions require additional data structures and thus introduce nonnegligible overhead in both runtime and memory consumption. In this paper, we provide algorithms that exploit hypertree decompositions for the materialisation and incremental evaluation of Datalog programs. Furthermore, we combine this approach with standard Datalog reasoning algorithms in a modular fashion so that the overhead caused by the decompositions is reduced. Our empirical evaluation shows that, when the program contains complex rules, the combined approach is usually significantly faster than the baseline approach, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Logic programming
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Description logics and ontologies
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Semantic Web