We consider the scenario of ontology-based query answering. It is generally accepted that true scalability in this setting can only be achieved via query rewriting, which in turn allows for the exploitation of standard RDBMSs. In this work, we close two open fundamental questions related to query rewriting. We establish that linear existential rules are polynomially combined rewritable, while full linear rules are polynomially (purely) rewritable; in both cases, the target query language consists of first-order or non-recursive Datalog queries. An immediate consequence of our results is that DLR-Lite_R, the extension of DL-Lite_R with n-ary roles, is polynomially combined rewritable.

Craig Knoblock (University of Southern California, USA) Hiroaki Kitano (Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Japan) Sebastian run (Stanford University, USA) Raj Reddy (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Ramasamy Uthurusamy (General Motors Corporation, retired) Erik Sandewall (Linköping Universit...

In this article we present DUAL-PECCS, an integrated Knowledge Representation system aimed at extending artificial capabilities in tasks such as conceptual categorization. It relies on two different sorts of cognitively inspired common-sense reasoning: prototypical reasoning and exemplars-based reasoning. Furthermore, it is grounded on the theoretical tenets coming from the dual process theory of the mind, and on the hypothesis of heterogeneous proxytypes, developed in the area of the biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA). The system has been integrated into the ACT-R cognitive architecture, and experimentally assessed in a conceptual categorization task, where a target concept illustrated by a simple common-sense linguistic description had to be identified by resorting to a mix of categorization strategies. Compared to human-level categorization, the obtained results suggest that our proposal can be helpful in extending the representational and reasoning conceptual capabilities of standard cognitive artificial systems.

We add epistemic modal operators to the language of here-and-there logic and define epistemic here-and-there models. We then successively define epistemic equilibrium models and autoepistemic equilibrium models. The former are obtained from here-and-there models by the standard minimisation of truth of Pearce’s equilibrium logic; they provide an epistemic extension of that logic. The latter are obtained from the former by maximising the set of epistemic possibilities; they provide a new semantics for Gelfond’s epistemic specifications.

During the last few years, the investigation of methodologies to automatically detect and characterise the figurative traits of textual contents has attracted a growing interest. Indeed, the capability to correctly deal with figurative language and more specifically with satire is fundamental to build robust approaches in several sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence including Sentiment Analysis and Affective Computing. In this paper we investigate the automatic detection of Tweets that advertise satirical news in English, Spanish and Italian. To this purpose we present a system that models Tweets from different languages by a set of language independent features that describe lexical, semantic and usage-related properties of the words of each Tweet. We approach the satire identification problem as binary classification of Tweets as satirical or not satirical messages. We test the performance of our system by performing experiments of both monolingual and cross-language classifications, evaluating the satire detection effectiveness of our features.Our system outperforms a word-based baseline and it is able to recognise if a news in Twitter is satirical or not with good accuracy. Moreover, we analyse the behaviour of the system across the different languages, obtaining interesting results.

We study the problem of structured output learning from a regression perspective. We first provide a general formulation of the kernel dependency estimation (KDE) problem using operator-valued kernels. We show that some of the existing formulations of this problem are special cases of our framework. We then propose a covariance-based operator-valued kernel that allows us to take into account the structure of the kernel feature space. This kernel operates on the output space and encodes the interactions between the outputs without any reference to the input space. To address this issue, we introduce a variant of our KDE method based on the conditional covariance operator that in addition to the correlation between the outputs takes into account the effects of the input variables. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our KDE approach using both covariance and conditional covariance kernels on two structured output problems, and compare it to the state-of-the-art kernel-based structured output regression methods.

Gaussian processes (GP) are powerful tools for probabilistic modeling purposes. They can be used to define prior distributions over latent functions in hierarchical Bayesian models. The prior over functions is defined implicitly by the mean and covariance function, which determine the smoothness and variability of the function. The inference can then be conducted directly in the function space by evaluating or approximating the posterior process. Despite their attractive theoretical properties GPs provide practical challenges in their implementation. GPstuff is a versatile collection of computational tools for GP models compatible with Linux and Windows MATLAB and Octave. It includes, among others, various inference methods, sparse approximations and tools for model assessment. In this work, we review these tools and demonstrate the use of GPstuff in several models.

Expectile regression is a nice tool for investigating conditional distributions beyond the conditional mean. It is well-known that expectiles can be described with the help of the asymmetric least square loss function, and this link makes it possible to estimate expectiles in a non-parametric framework by a support vector machine like approach. In this work we develop an efficient sequential-minimal-optimization-based solver for the underlying optimization problem. The behavior of the solver is investigated by conducting various experiments and the results are compared with the recent R-package ER-Boost.

Gelfond and Zhang recently proposed a new stable model semantics based on Vicious Circle Principle in order to improve the interpretation of logic programs with aggregates. The paper focuses on this proposal, and analyzes the complexity of both coherence testing and cautious reasoning under the new semantics. Some surprising results highlight similarities and differences versus mainstream stable model semantics for aggregates. Moreover, the paper reports on the design of compilation techniques for implementing the new semantics on top of existing ASP solvers, which eventually lead to realize a prototype system that allows for experimenting with Gelfond-Zhang's aggregates. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Proceedings of ICLP 2015.

Fuzzy answer set programming (FASP) combines two declarative frameworks, answer set programming and fuzzy logic, in order to model reasoning by default over imprecise information. Several connectives are available to combine different expressions; in particular the \Godel and \Luka fuzzy connectives are usually considered, due to their properties. Although the \Godel conjunction can be easily eliminated from rule heads, we show through complexity arguments that such a simplification is infeasible in general for all other connectives. %, even if bodies are restricted to \Luka or \Godel conjunctions. The paper analyzes a translation of FASP programs into satisfiability modulo theories~(SMT), which in general produces quantified formulas because of the minimality of the semantics. Structural properties of many FASP programs allow to eliminate the quantification, or to sensibly reduce the number of quantified variables. Indeed, integrality constraints can replace recursive rules commonly used to force Boolean interpretations, and completion subformulas can guarantee minimality for acyclic programs with atomic heads. Moreover, head cycle free rules can be replaced by shifted subprograms, whose structure depends on the eliminated head connective, so that ordered completion may replace the minimality check if also \Luka disjunction in rule bodies is acyclic. The paper also presents and evaluates a prototype system implementing these translations. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Proceedings of ICLP 2015.