A machine learning approach for optimizing heuristic decision‐making in Web Ontology Language reasoners. (12th October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mehri, Razieh; Haarslev, Volker; Chinaei, Hamidreza
• Is Part Of: Computational intelligence. Volume 37:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 273
• Page End: 314
• Publication Date: 2020-10-12
• Subjects: description logic reasoning -- machine learning -- OWL reasoning -- tableau optimization techniques; Artificial intelligence -- Periodicals; Computational linguistics -- Periodicals; 006.3
• DOI: 10.1111/coin.12404
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0824-7935

Abstract

Abstract: Description logics (DLs) are formalisms for representing knowledge bases of application domains. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a syntactic variant of a very expressive DL. OWL reasoners can infer implied information from OWL ontologies. The performance of OWL reasoners can be severely affected by situations that require decision‐making over many alternatives. Such a nondeterministic behavior is often controlled by heuristics that are based on insufficient information. This article proposes a novel OWL reasoning approach that applies machine learning (ML) to implement pragmatic and optimal decision‐making strategies in such situations. Disjunctions occurring in ontologies are one source of nondeterministic actions in reasoners. We propose two ML‐based approaches to reduce the nondeterminism caused by dealing with disjunctions. The first approach is restricted to propositional DL while the second one can deal with standard DL. Both approaches speed up our ML‐based reasoner by up to two orders of magnitude in comparison to the non‐ML reasoner. Another source of nondeterministic actions is the order in which tableau rules should be applied. On average, our ML‐based approach achieves a speedup of two orders of magnitude when compared to the most expensive rule ordering of the non‐ML reasoner.