Reformulating Queries: Theory and Practice

Reformulating Queries: Theory and Practice

Michael Benedikt, Egor V. Kostylev, Fabio Mogavero, Efthymia Tsamoura

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 837-843. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/116

We consider a setting where a user wants to pose a query against a dataset where background knowledge, expressed as logical sentences, is available, but only a subset of the information can be used to answer the query. We thus want to reformulate the user query against the subvocabulary, arriving at a query equivalent to the user’s query assuming the background theory, but using only the restricted vocabulary. We consider two variations of the problem, one where we want any such reformulation and another where we restrict the size. We present a classification of the complexity of the problem, then provide algorithms for solving the problems in practice and evaluate their performance.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Logics for Knowledge Representation