On Bisimulations for Description Logics

We study bisimulations for useful description logics. The simplest among the considered logics is $\mathcal{ALC}_{reg}$ (a variant of PDL). The others extend that logic with inverse roles, nominals, quantified number restrictions, the universal role, and/or the concept constructor for expressing the local reflexivity of a role. They also allow role axioms. We give results about invariance of concepts, TBoxes and ABoxes, preservation of RBoxes and knowledge bases, and the Hennessy-Milner property w.r.t. bisimulations in the considered description logics. Using the invariance results we compare the expressiveness of the considered description logics w.r.t. concepts, TBoxes and ABoxes. Our results about separating the expressiveness of description logics are naturally extended to the case when instead of $\mathcal{ALC}_{reg}$ we have any sublogic of $\mathcal{ALC}_{reg}$ that extends $\mathcal{ALC}$. We also provide results on the largest auto-bisimulations and quotient interpretations w.r.t. such equivalence relations. Such results are useful for minimizing interpretations and concept learning in description logics. To deal with minimizing interpretations for the case when the considered logic allows quantified number restrictions and/or the constructor for the local reflexivity of a role, we introduce a new notion called QS-interpretation, which is needed for obtaining expected results. By adapting Hopcroft's automaton minimization algorithm and the Paige-Tarjan algorithm, we give efficient algorithms for computing the partition corresponding to the largest auto-bisimulation of a finite interpretation.Comment: 42 page

Computing Crisp Bisimulations for Fuzzy Structures

Fuzzy structures such as fuzzy automata, fuzzy transition systems, weighted social networks and fuzzy interpretations in fuzzy description logics have been widely studied. For such structures, bisimulation is a natural notion for characterizing indiscernibility between states or individuals. There are two kinds of bisimulations for fuzzy structures: crisp bisimulations and fuzzy bisimulations. While the latter fits to the fuzzy paradigm, the former has also attracted attention due to the application of crisp equivalence relations, for example, in minimizing structures. Bisimulations can be formulated for fuzzy labeled graphs and then adapted to other fuzzy structures. In this article, we present an efficient algorithm for computing the partition corresponding to the largest crisp bisimulation of a given finite fuzzy labeled graph. Its complexity is of order $O((m\log{l} + n)\log{n})$, where $n$, $m$ and $l$ are the number of vertices, the number of nonzero edges and the number of different fuzzy degrees of edges of the input graph, respectively. We also study a similar problem for the setting with counting successors, which corresponds to the case with qualified number restrictions in description logics and graded modalities in modal logics. In particular, we provide an efficient algorithm with the complexity $O((m\log{m} + n)\log{n})$ for the considered problem in that setting