This paper is aimed as a contribution to the use of formal modal languages in Artificial Intelligence. We introduce a multi-modal version of Second-order Propositional Modal Logic (SOPML), an extension of modal logic with propositional quantification, and illustrate its usefulness as a specification language for knowledge representation as well as temporal and spatial reasoning. Then, we define novel notions of (bi)simulation and prove that these preserve the interpretation of SOPML formulas. Finally, we apply these results to assess the expressive power of SOPML.

We investigate the problem of learning description logic (DL) ontologies in Angluin et al.’s framework of exact learning via queries posed to an oracle. We consider membership queries of the form “is a tuple a of individuals a certain answer to a data retrieval query q in a given ABox and the unknown target ontology?” and completeness queries of the form “does a hypothesis ontology entail the unknown target ontology?” Given a DL L and a data retrieval query language Q, we study polynomial learnability of ontologies in L using data retrieval queries in Q and provide an almost complete classification for DLs that are fragments of EL with role inclusions and of DL-Lite and for data retrieval queries that range from atomic queries and EL/ELI-instance queries to conjunctive queries. Some results are proved by non-trivial reductions to learning from subsumption examples.

The 15th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2015) will be held in San Diego, California, USA, June 8-12, 2015, at the University of San Diego, at the Kroc Institute, under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an organization devoted to promoting research and development in the field of AI and law with members throughout the world. The conference is held in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and with ACM SIGAI (the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Association for Computing Machinery).

The 15th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2015) will be held in San Diego, California, USA, June 8-12, 2015, at the University of San Diego, at the Kroc Institute, under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an organization devoted to promoting research and development in the field of AI and law with members throughout the world. The conference is held in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and with ACM SIGAI (the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Association for Computing Machinery).

We propose a new type of algorithm for computing first-order (FO) rewritings of concept queries under ELHdr-TBoxes. The algorithm is tailored towards efficient implementation, yet complete. It outputs a succinct non-recursive datalog rewriting if the input is FO-rewritable and otherwise reports non-FO-rewritability. We carry out experiments with real-world ontologies which demonstrate excellent performance in practice and show that TBoxes originating from applications admit FO-rewritings of reasonable size in almost all cases, even when in theory such rewritings are not guaranteed to exist.

We study the problem of designing envy-free sponsored search auctions, where bidders are budget-constrained. Our primary goal is to design auctions that maximize social welfare and revenue — two classical objectives in auction theory. For this purpose, we characterize envy-freeness with budgets by proving several elementary properties including consistency, monotonicity and transitivity. Based on this characterization, we come up with an envy-free auction, that is both social-optimal and bidder-optimal for a wide class of bidder types. More generally, for all bidder types, we provide two polynomial time approximation schemes (PTASs) for maximizing social welfare or revenue, where the notion of envy-freeness has been relaxed slightly. Finally, in cases where randomization is allowed in designing auctions, we devise similar PTASs for social welfare or revenue maximization problems.

The paper analyses multi-agent strategic dialogues on possibly infinite argumentation frameworks. We develop a formal model for representing such dialogues, and introduce FO A -ATL, a first-order extension of alternating-time logic, for expressing the interplay of strategic and argumentation-theoretic properties. This setting is investigated with respect to the model checking problem, by means of a suitable notion of bisimulation. This notion of bisimulation is also used to shed light on how static properties of argumentation frameworks influence their dynamic behaviour.

The paper develops a formal theory of the degree of justification of arguments, which relies solely on the structure of an argumentation framework. The theory is based on a generalisation of Dung’s notion of acceptability, making it sensitive to the numbers of attacks and counter-attacks on arguments. Graded generalisations of argumentation semantics are then obtained and studied. The theory is applied by showing how it can arbitrate between competing preferred extensions and how it captures a specific form of accrual in instantiated argumentation.

We study voting games on binary issues, where voters might hold an objective over some issues at stake, while willing to strike deals on the remaining ones, and can influence one another’s voting decision before the vote takes place. We analyse voters’ rational behaviour in the resulting two-phase game, showing under what conditions undesirable equilibria can be removed as an effect of the pre-vote phase.

We develop a methodology to model and verify Regarding the second limitation, proposals have been put open multi-agent systems (OMAS), where agents forward to consider a set of objects that vary at design time; may join in or leave at run time. Further, we specify the set of agents is normally considered to be finite in each properties of interest on OMAS in a variant of firstorder system run. This is a sensible assumption in many scenarios, temporal-epistemic logic, whose characterising but there are applications of MAS (e.g., e-commerce, smart features include epistemic modalities indexed grids) where an unbounded number of agents may freely enter to individual terms, interpreted on agents appearing and leave the system at run time. There is, therefore, at a given state. This formalism notably allows a need to account for the unbounded and possibly infinite to express group knowledge dynamically. We study agents joining in or leaving an open MAS. In this setting it the verification problem of these systems and show is still of interest to reason about their evolution and what that, under specific conditions, finite bisimilar abstractions they know individually and collectively. For example, in an can be obtained.