A Tableaux-Based Method for Computing Least Common Subsumers for Expressive Description Logics

Least Common Subsumers (LCS) have been proposed in Description Logics (DL) to capture the commonalities between two or more concepts. Since its introduction in 1992,  LCS have been successfully employed  as a logical tool for a variety of applications, spanning from inductive learning, to bottom-up construction of knowledge bases, information retrieval,  to name a few. The best known algorithm for computing LCS uses structural comparison on normal forms, and the most expressive DL it is applied to is ALEN. We provide a general tableau-based calculus for computing LCS, via substitutions on concept terms containing concept variables. We show the applicability of our method to an expressive DL (but without disjunction and full negation), discuss complexity issues, and show the generality of our proposal.