An unsupervised approach to disjointness learning based on terminological cluster trees

In the context of the Semantic Web regarded as a Web of Data, research efforts have been devoted to improving the quality of the ontologies that are used as vocabularies to enable complex services based on automated reasoning. From various surveys it emerges that many domains would require better ontologies that include non-negligible constraints for properly conveying the intended semantics. In this respect, disjointness axioms are representative of this general problem: these axioms are essential for making the negative knowledge about the domain of interest explicit yet they are often overlooked during the modeling process (thus affecting the efficacy of the reasoning services). To tackle this problem, automated methods for discovering these axioms can be used as a tool for supporting knowledge engineers in modeling new ontologies or evolving existing ones. The current solutions, either based on statistical correlations or relying on external corpora, often do not fully exploit the terminology. Stemming from this consideration, we have been investigating on alternative methods to elicit disjointness axioms from existing ontologies based on the induction of terminological cluster trees, which are logic trees in which each node stands for a cluster of individuals which emerges as a sub-concept. The growth of such trees relies on a divide-and-conquer procedure that assigns, for the cluster representing the root node, one of the concept descriptions generated via a refinement operator and selected according to a heuristic based on the minimization of the risk of overlap between the candidate sub-clusters (quantified in terms of the distance between two prototypical individuals). Preliminary works have showed some shortcomings that are tackled in this paper. To tackle the task of disjointness axioms discovery we have extended the terminological cluster tree induction framework with various contributions: 1) the adoption of different distance measures for clustering the individuals of a knowledge base; 2) the adoption of different heuristics for selecting the most promising concept descriptions; 3) a modified version of the refinement operator to prevent the introduction of inconsistency during the elicitation of the new axioms. A wide empirical evaluation showed the feasibility of the proposed extensions and the improvement with respect to alternative approaches

On the Computation of Common Subsumers in Description Logics

Description logics (DL) knowledge bases are often build by users with expertise in the application domain, but little expertise in logic. To support this kind of users when building their knowledge bases a number of extension methods have been proposed to provide the user with concept descriptions as a starting point for new concept definitions. The inference service central to several of these approaches is the computation of (least) common subsumers of concept descriptions. In case disjunction of concepts can be expressed in the DL under consideration, the least common subsumer (lcs) is just the disjunction of the input concepts. Such a trivial lcs is of little use as a starting point for a new concept definition to be edited by the user. To address this problem we propose two approaches to obtain "meaningful" common subsumers in the presence of disjunction tailored to two different methods to extend DL knowledge bases. More precisely, we devise computation methods for the approximation-based approach and the customization of DL knowledge bases, extend these methods to DLs with number restrictions and discuss their efficient implementation

Using ontologies to enhance human understandability of global post-hoc explanations of black-box models

The interest in explainable artificial intelligence has grown strongly in recent years because of the need to convey safety and trust in the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of automated decision-making to users. While a plethora of approaches has been developed, only a few focus on how to use domain knowledge and how this influences the understanding of explanations by users. In this paper, we show that by using ontologies we can improve the human understandability of global post-hoc explanations, presented in the form of decision trees. In particular, we introduce Trepan Reloaded, which builds on Trepan, an algorithm that extracts surrogate decision trees from black-box models. Trepan Reloaded includes ontologies, that model domain knowledge, in the process of extracting explanations to improve their understandability. We tested the understandability of the extracted explanations by humans in a user study with four different tasks. We evaluate the results in terms of response times and correctness, subjective ease of understanding and confidence, and similarity of free text responses. The results show that decision trees generated with Trepan Reloaded, taking into account domain knowledge, are significantly more understandable throughout than those generated by standard Trepan. The enhanced understandability of post-hoc explanations is achieved with little compromise on the accuracy with which the surrogate decision trees replicate the behaviour of the original neural network models

Automatic domain-specific learning: towards a methodology for ontology enrichment

[EN] At the current rate of technological development, in a world where enormous amount of data are constantly created and in which the Internet is used as the primary means for information exchange, there exists a need for tools that help processing, analyzing and using that information. However, while the growth of information poses many opportunities for social and scientific advance, it has also highlighted the difficulties of extracting meaningful patterns from massive data. Ontologies have been claimed to play a major role in the processing of large-scale data, as they serve as universal models of knowledge representation, and are being studied as possible solutions to this. This paper presents a method for the automatic expansion of ontologies based on corpus and terminological data exploitation. The proposed ¿ontology enrichment method¿ (OEM) consists of a sequence of tasks aimed at classifying an input keyword automatically under its corresponding node within a target ontology. Results prove that the method can be successfully applied for the automatic classification of specialized units into a reference ontology.Financial support for this research has been provided by the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant FFI2011-29798-C0201.Ureña Gómez-Moreno, P.; Mestre-Mestre, EM. (2017). Automatic domain-specific learning: towards a methodology for ontology enrichment. LFE. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos. 23(2):63-85. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/148357S638523

Combining machine learning and semantic web: A systematic mapping study

In line with the general trend in artificial intelligence research to create intelligent systems that combine learning and symbolic components, a new sub-area has emerged that focuses on combining Machine Learning components with techniques developed by the Semantic Web community - Semantic Web Machine Learning (SWeML). Due to its rapid growth and impact on several communities in thepast two decades, there is a need to better understand the space of these SWeML Systems, their characteristics, and trends. Yet, surveys that adopt principled and unbiased approaches are missing. To fill this gap, we performed a systematic study and analyzed nearly 500 papers published in the past decade in this area, where we focused on evaluating architectural and application-specific features. Our analysis identified a rapidly growing interest in SWeML Systems, with a high impact on several application domains and tasks. Catalysts for this rapid growth are the increased application of deep learning and knowledge graph technologies. By leveraging the in-depth understanding of this area acquired through this study, a further key contribution of this article is a classification system for SWeML Systems that we publish as ontology.</p

Machine Learning Meets the Semantic Web

Remarkable progress in research has shown the efficiency of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) in extracting valuable external knowledge in various domains. A Knowledge Graph (KG) can illustrate high-order relations that connect two objects with one or multiple related attributes. The emerging Graph Neural Networks (GNN) can extract both object characteristics and relations from KGs. This paper presents how Machine Learning (ML) meets the Semantic Web and how KGs are related to Neural Networks and Deep Learning. The paper also highlights important aspects of this area of research, discussing open issues such as the bias hidden in KGs at different levels of graph representation

Trepan Reloaded: A Knowledge-driven Approach to Explaining Artificial Neural Networks

Explainability in Artificial Intelligence has been revived as a topic of active research by the need of conveying safety and trust to users in the `how' and `why' of automated decision-making. Whilst a plethora of approaches have been developed for post-hoc explainability, only a few focus on how to use domain knowledge, and how this influences the understandability of global explanations from the users' perspective. In this paper, we show how ontologies help the understandability of global post-hoc explanations, presented in the form of symbolic models. In particular, we build on Trepan, an algorithm that explains artificial neural networks by means of decision trees, and we extend it to include ontologies modeling domain knowledge in the process of generating explanations. We present the results of a user study that measures the understandability of decision trees using a syntactic complexity measure, and through time and accuracy of responses as well as reported user confidence and understandability. The user study considers domains where explanations are critical, namely, in finance and medicine. The results show that decision trees generated with our algorithm, taking into account domain knowledge, are more understandable than those generated by standard Trepan without the use of ontologies