Unification in the Description Logic EL

The Description Logic EL has recently drawn considerable attention since, on the one hand, important inference problems such as the subsumption problem are polynomial. On the other hand, EL is used to define large biomedical ontologies. Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The main result of this paper is that unification in EL is decidable. More precisely, EL-unification is NP-complete, and thus has the same complexity as EL-matching. We also show that, w.r.t. the unification type, EL is less well-behaved: it is of type zero, which in particular implies that there are unification problems that have no finite complete set of unifiers.Comment: 31page

The complexity of admissible rules of {\L}ukasiewicz logic

We investigate the computational complexity of admissibility of inference rules in infinite-valued {\L}ukasiewicz propositional logic (\L). It was shown in [13] that admissibility in {\L} is checkable in PSPACE. We establish that this result is optimal, i.e., admissible rules of {\L} are PSPACE-complete. In contrast, derivable rules of {\L} are known to be coNP-complete.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures; to appear in Journal of Logic and Computatio

Dismatching and Local Disunification in EL

Unification in Description Logics has been introduced as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. We try to extend the known decidability results for unification in the Description Logic EL to disunification since negative constraints on unifiers can be used to avoid unwanted unifiers. While decidability of the solvability of general EL-disunification problems remains an open problem, we obtain NP-completeness results for two interesting special cases: dismatching problems, where one side of each negative constraint must be ground, and local solvability of disunification problems, where we restrict the attention to solutions that are built from so-called atoms occurring in the input problem. More precisely, we first show that dismatching can be reduced to local disunification, and then provide two complementary NP-algorithms for finding local solutions of (general) disunification problems

Admissibility and unifiability in contact logics

Contact logics are logics for reasoning about the contact relations between regular subsets in a topological space. Admissible inference rules can be used to improve the performance of any algorithm that handles provability within the context of contact logics. The decision problem of unifiability can be seen as a special case of the decision problem of admissibility. In this paper, we examine the decidability of admissibility problems and unifiability problems in contact logics

Dismatching and Local Disunification in EL

Unification in Description Logics has been introduced as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. We try to extend the known decidability results for unification in the Description Logic EL to disunification since negative constraints on unifiers can be used to avoid unwanted unifiers. While decidability of the solvability of general EL-disunification problems remains an open problem, we obtain NP-completeness results for two interesting special cases: dismatching problems, where one side of each negative constraint must be ground, and local solvability of disunification problems, where we restrict the attention to solutions that are built from so-called atoms occurring in the input problem. More precisely, we first show that dismatching can be reduced to local disunification, and then provide two complementary NP-algorithms for finding local solutions of (general) disunification problems

About the type of modal logics for the unification problem

Dans cette thèse, nous étudierons le problème de l'unification dans les logiques modales ordinaires, les fusions de deux logiques modales et les logiques épistémiques multi-modales. Relativement à une logique propositionnelle L, étant donnée une formule A, nous devons trouver des substitutions s telle que s(A) est dans L. Lorsqu'elles existent, ces substitutions sont appelées unifieurs de A dans L. Nous étudions différentes méthodes pour construire des ensembles minimaux complets d'unifieurs d'une formule donnée A et, en fonction de la cardinalité des ces ensembles minimaux complets, nous discutons du type de l'unification de A. Enfin, nous déterminons les types de l'unification de plusieurs logiques propositionnelles.In this thesis, we shall investigate on the unification problem in ordinary modal logics, fusions of two modal logics and multi-modal epistemic logics. With respect to a propositional logic L, given a formula A, we have to find substitutions s such that s(A) is in L. When they exist, these substitutions are called unifiers of A in L. We study different methods for the construction of minimal complete sets of unifiers of a given formula A and according to the cardinality of these minimal complete sets, we shall discuss on the unification type of A. Then, we determine the unification types of several propositional logics

Action, Time and Space in Description Logics

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of logic-based knowledge representation (KR) formalisms designed to represent and reason about static conceptual knowledge in a semantically well-understood way. On the other hand, standard action formalisms are KR formalisms based on classical logic designed to model and reason about dynamic systems. The largest part of the present work is dedicated to integrating DLs with action formalisms, with the main goal of obtaining decidable action formalisms with an expressiveness significantly beyond propositional. To this end, we offer DL-tailored solutions to the frame and ramification problem. One of the main technical results is that standard reasoning problems about actions (executability and projection), as well as the plan existence problem are decidable if one restricts the logic for describing action pre- and post-conditions and the state of the world to decidable Description Logics. A smaller part of the work is related to decidable extensions of Description Logics with concrete datatypes, most importantly with those allowing to refer to the notions of space and time