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  <front>
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    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>A Formal Characterization of Concept Learning in Description Logics</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Francesca A. Lisi</string-name>
          <email>lisi@di.uniba.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita degli Studi di Bari \Aldo Moro"</institution>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Among the inferences studied in Description Logics (DLs), induction has been paid increasing attention over the last decade. Indeed, useful non-standard reasoning tasks can be based on the inductive inference. Among them, Concept Learning is about the automated induction of a description for a given concept starting from classi ed instances of the concept. In this paper we present a formal characterization of Concept Learning in DLs which relies on recent results in Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Building and maintaining large ontologies pose several challenges to Knowledge
Representation (KR) because of their size. In DL ontologies, although
standard inferences help structuring the knowledge base (KB), e.g., by
automatically building a concept hierarchy, they are, for example, not su cient when it
comes to (automatically) generating new concept descriptions from given ones.
They also fail if the concepts are speci ed using di erent vocabularies (i.e. sets
of concept names and role names) or if they are described on di erent levels of
abstraction. Altogether it has turned out that for building and maintaining large
DL KBs, besides the standard inferences, additional so-called non-standard
inferences are required [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19 ref27">27,19</xref>
        ]. Among them, the rst ones to be studied have been
the Least Common Subsumer (LCS) of a set concepts [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] and the Most Speci c
Concept (MSC) of an individual [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref10 ref20 ref32">32,10,20,1</xref>
        ]. Very recently, a uni ed framework
for non-standard reasoning services in DLs has been proposed [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. It is based on
the use of second-order sentences in DLs [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ] as the unifying de nition model for
all those constructive reasoning tasks which rely on speci c optimality criteria
to build up the objective concept. E.g., LCS is one of the cases considered for
one such reformulation in terms of optimal solution problems.
      </p>
      <p>
        Since [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ], much work has been done in DL reasoning to support the
construction and maintenance of DL KBs. This work has been more or less explicitly
related to induction. E.g., the notion of LCS has subsequently been used for the
bottom-up induction of Classic concept descriptions from examples [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5 ref6">5,6</xref>
        ].
Induction has been widely studied in Machine Learning (ML). Therefore it does
not come as a surprise that the problem of nding an appropriate concept
description for given concept instances, reformulated as a problem of inductive
learning from examples, has been faced in ML, initially attacked by heuristic
means [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14 ref18 ref6">6,18,14</xref>
        ] and more recently in a formal manner [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12 ref13 ref2 ref22">2,12,13,22</xref>
        ] by adopting
the methods and the techniques of that ML approach known as Concept Learning.
      </p>
      <p>In this paper, we present a formal characterization of Concept Learning in DLs
which relies on recent results in KR and ML. Notably, the proposed formulation
can be justi ed by observing that the inductive inference deals with nding
or constructing - a concept. Therefore, non-standard reasoning services based
on induction can be considered as constructive reasoning tasks. Starting from
this assumption, and inspired by Colucci et al 's framework, Concept Learning is
modeled as a second-order concept expression in DLs and reformulated in terms
that allow for a construction possibly subject to some optimality criteria.</p>
      <p>The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 is devoted to preliminaries on
Concept Learning according to the ML tradition. Section 3 de nes the Concept
Learning problem statement in the KR context. Section 4 proposes a
reformulation of Concept Learning as a constructive reasoning task in DLs. Section 5
concludes the paper with nal remarks and directions of future work.
2
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Preliminaries</title>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>Machine Learning</title>
        <p>
          The goal of ML is the design and development of algorithms that allow computers
to evolve behaviors based on empirical data [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref30">30</xref>
          ]. The automation of the inductive
inference plays a key role in ML algorithms, though other inferences such as
abduction and analogy are also considered. The e ect of applying inductive
ML algorithms depends on whether the scope of induction is discrimination or
characterization [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28">28</xref>
          ]. Discriminant induction aims at inducing hypotheses with
discriminant power as required in tasks such as classi cation. In classi cation,
observations to learn from are labeled as positive or negative instances of a given
class. Characteristic induction is more suitable for nding regularities in a data
set. This corresponds to learning from positive examples only.
        </p>
        <p>
          Ideally, the ML task is to discover an operational description of a target
function f : X ! Y which maps elements in the instance space X to the values of a
set Y . The target function is unknown, meaning that only a set D (the training
data) of points of the form (x; f (x)) is provided. However, it may be very di cult
in general to learn such a description of f perfectly. In fact, ML algorithms are
often expected to acquire only some approximation f^ to f by searching a very
large space H of possible hypotheses (the hypothesis space) which depend on the
representation chosen for f (the language of hypotheses ). The output
approximation is the one that best ts D according to a scoring function score(f; D). It
is assumed that any hypothesis h 2 H that approximates f well w.r.t. a large set
of training cases will also approximate it well for new unobserved cases. These
notions have been mathematically formalized in computational learning theory
within the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning framework [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref36">36</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>Summing up, given a hypothesis space H and a training data set D, ML
algorithms are designed to nd an approximation f^ of a target function f s.t.:
1. f^ 2 H;
2. f^(D) f (D); and/or
3. f^ = argmaxf2Hscore(f; D).</p>
        <p>
          It has been recently stressed that the rst two requirements impose constraints
on the possible hypotheses, thus de ning a Constraint Satisfaction Problem
(CSP), whereas the third requirement involves the optimization step, thus
turning the CSP into an Optimization Problem (OP) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          ]. We shall refer to the
ensemble of constraints and optimization criterion as the model of the learning task.
Models are almost by de nition declarative and it is useful to distinguish the
CSP, which is concerned with nding a solution that satis es all the constraints
in the model, from the OP, where one also must guarantee that the found
solution be optimal w.r.t. the optimization function. Examples of typical CSPs in
the ML context include Concept Learning for reasons that will become clearer by
reading the following subsection.
2.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>Concept Learning</title>
        <p>Concept Learning deals with inferring the general de nition of a category based
on members (positive examples) and nonmembers (negative examples) of this
category. Here, the target is a boolean-valued function f : X ! f0; 1g, i.e. a
concept. When examples of the target concept are available, the resulting ML
task is said supervised, otherwise it is called unsupervised. The positive examples
are those instances with f (x) = 1, and negative ones are those with f (x) = 0.</p>
        <p>
          In Concept Learning, the key inferential mechanism for induction is
generalization as search through a partially ordered space of inductive hypotheses [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
          ].
Hypotheses may be ordered from the most general ones to the most speci c
ones. We say that an instance x 2 X satis es a hypothesis h 2 H if and only if
h(x) = 1. Given two hypotheses hi and hj , hi is more general than or equal to
hj (written hi g hj , where g denotes a generality relation) if and only if any
instance satisfying hj , also satis es hi. Note that it may not be always possible
to compare two hypotheses with a generality relation: the instances satis ed by
the hypotheses may intersect, and not necessarily be subsumed by one another.
The relation g de nes a partial order (i.e., it is re exive, antisymmetric, and
transitive) over the space of hypotheses.
        </p>
        <p>A hypothesis h that correctly classi es all training examples is called
consistent with these examples. For a consistent hypothesis h it holds that h(x) = f (x)
for each instance x. The set of all hypotheses consistent with the training
examples is called the version space with respect to H and D. Concept Learning
algorithms may use the hypothesis space structure to e ciently search for
relevant hypotheses. E.g., they may perform a speci c-to-general search through
the hypothesis space along one branch of the partial ordering, to nd the most
speci c hypothesis consistent with the training examples. Another well known
approach, candidate elimination, consists of computing the version space by an
incremental computation of the sets of maximally speci c and maximally
general hypotheses. An important issue in Concept Learning is associated with the
so-called inductive bias, i.e. the set of assumptions that the learning algorithm
uses for prediction of outputs given previously unseen inputs. These assumptions
represent the nature of the target function, so the learning approach implicitly
makes assumptions on the correct output for unseen examples.</p>
        <p>
          Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) was born at the intersection between
Concept Learning and the eld of Logic Programming [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
          ]. From Concept
Learning it has inherited the inferential mechanisms for induction [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33">33</xref>
          ]. However, a
distinguishing feature of ILP with respect to other forms of Concept Learning is
the use of prior knowledge of the domain of interest, called background knowledge
(BK), during the search for hypotheses. Due to the roots in Logic Programming,
ILP was originally concerned with Concept Learning problems where both
hypotheses, observations and BK are expressed with rst-order Horn rules
(usually Datalog for computational reasons). E.g., Foil is a popular ILP algorithm
for learning sets of Datalog rules for classi cation purposes [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref34">34</xref>
          ]. It performs
a greedy search in order to maximize an information gain function. Therefore,
Foil implements an OP version of Concept Learning.
        </p>
        <p>
          Over the last decade, ILP has widened its scope signi cantly, by
considering, e.g., learning in DLs (see next section) as well as within those hybrid KR
frameworks integrating DLs and rst-order clausal languages [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref25 ref26 ref35">35,17,25,26</xref>
          ].
3
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Learning Concepts in Description Logics</title>
      <p>
        Early work on the application of ML to DLs essentially focused on demonstrating
the PAC-learnability for various terminological languages derived from Classic.
In particular, Cohen and Hirsh investigate the CoreClassic DL proving that it
is not PAC-learnable [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] as well as demonstrating the PAC-learnability of its
sublanguages, such as C-Classic [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ], through the bottom-up LcsLearn algorithm.
It is also worth mentioning unsupervised learning methodologies for DL concept
descriptions, whose prototypical example is Kluster [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ], a polynomial-time
algorithm for the induction of BACK terminologies. More recently, algorithms have
been proposed that follow the generalization as search approach by extending
the methodological apparatus of ILP to DL languages [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12 ref2 ref21 ref22">2,11,12,21,22</xref>
        ]. Supervised
(resp., unsupervised) learning systems, such as YinYang [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] and DL-Learner
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ], have been implemented. Based on a set of re nement operators borrowed
from YinYang and DL-Learner, a new version of the Foil algorithm, named
DL-Foil, has been proposed [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. In DL-Foil, the information gain function
takes into account the Open World Assumption (OWA) holding in DLs. Indeed,
many instances may be available which cannot be ascribed to the target concept
nor to its negation. This requires a di erent setting to ensure a special treatment
of the unlabeled individuals.
3.1
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>The Problem Statement</title>
        <p>In this section, the supervised Concept Learning problem in the DL setting is
formally de ned. For the purpose, we denote:
{ T and A are the TBox and the ABox, respectively, of a DL KB K
{ Ind(A) is the set of all individuals occurring in A
{ RetrK(C) is the set of all individuals occurring in A that are an instance of
a given concept C w.r.t. T
{ IndC+(A) = fa 2 Ind(A) j C(a) 2 Ag RetrK(C)
{ IndC (A) = fb 2 Ind(A) j :C(b) 2 Ag RetrK(:C)
These sets can be easily computed by resorting to retrieval inference services
usually available in DL systems.</p>
        <p>De nition 1 (Concept Learning). Let K = (T ; A) be a DL KB. Given:
{ a (new) target concept name C
{ a set of positive and negative examples IndC+(A) [ IndC (A)
{ a concept description language DLH
the Concept Learning problem is to nd a concept de nition C
D 2 DLH satis es the following conditions
Completeness K j= D(a)
Consistency K j= :D(b)
8a 2 IndC+(A) and
8b 2 IndC (A)</p>
        <p>Ind(A) for C</p>
        <p>D such that</p>
        <p>Note that the de nition given above provides the CSP version of the
supervised Concept Learning problem. However, as already mentioned, Concept
Learning can be regarded also as an OP. Algorithms such as DL-Foil testify
the existence of optimality criteria to be ful lled in Concept Learning besides the
conditions of completeness and consistency.
3.2</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>The Solution Strategy</title>
        <p>
          In Def. 1, we have considered a language of hypotheses DLH that allows for
the generation of concept de nitions in any DL. These de nitions can be
organized according to the concept subsumption relationship v. Since v induces a
quasi-order (i.e., a re exive and transitive relation) on DLH [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref2">2,11</xref>
          ], the
problem stated in Def. 1 can be cast as the search for a correct (i.e., complete and
consistent) concept de nition in (DLH; v) according to the generalization as
search approach in Mitchell's vision. In such a setting, one can de ne suitable
techniques (called re nement operators ) to traverse (DLH; v) either top-down
or bottom-up.
        </p>
        <p>De nition 2 (Re nement operator in DLs). Given a quasi-ordered search
space (DLH; v)
{ a downward re nement operator is a mapping
: DLH ! 2DLH such that
8C 2 DLH
(C)
fD 2 DLH j D v Cg
{ an upward re nement operator is a mapping : DLH ! 2DLH such that
(C)
fD 2 DLH j C v Dg</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>De nition 3 (Re nement chain in DLs). Given a downward (resp., up</title>
        <p>ward) re nement operator (resp., ) for a quasi-ordered search space (DLH; v),
a re nement chain from C 2 DLH to D 2 DLH is a sequence</p>
        <p>C = C0; C1; : : : ; Cn = D
such that Ci 2 (Ci 1) (resp., Ci 2 (Ci 1)) for every 1
i</p>
        <p>Note that, given (DL; v), there is an in nite number of generalizations and
specializations. Usually one tries to de ne re nement operators that can
traverse e ciently throughout the hypothesis space in pursuit of one of the correct
de nitions (w.r.t. the examples that have been provided).</p>
        <p>De nition 4 (Properties of re nement operators in DLs). A downward
re nement operator for a quasi-ordered search space (DLH; v) is
{ (locally) nite i (C) is nite for all concepts C 2 DLH.
{ redundant i there exists a re nement chain from a concept C 2 DLH to a
concept D 2 DLH, which does not go through some concept E 2 DLH and a
re nement chain from C to a concept equal to D, which does go through E.
{ proper i for all concepts C; D 2 DLH, D 2 (C) implies C 6 D.
{ complete i , for all concepts C; D 2 DLH with C @ D, a concept E 2 DLH
with E C can be reached from D by .
{ weakly complete i , for all concepts C 2 DLH with C @ &gt;, a concept</p>
        <p>E 2 DLH with E C can be reached from &gt; by .</p>
        <p>The corresponding notions for upward re nement operators are de ned dually.</p>
        <p>
          Designing a re nement operator needs to make decisions on which properties
are most useful in practice regarding the underlying learning algorithm.
Considering the properties reported in Def. 4, it has been shown that the most feasible
property combination for Concept Learning in expressive DLs such as ALC is
fweakly complete; complete; properg [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
          ]. Only for less expressive DLs like E L,
ideal, i.e. complete, proper and nite, operators exist [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
          ].
4
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Concept Learning as Constructive Reasoning in DLs</title>
      <p>In this section, we formally characterize Concept Learning in DLs by emphasizing
the constructive nature of the inductive inference.
4.1</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Second-order Concept Expressions</title>
        <p>We assume to start from the syntax of any Description Logic DL where Nc, Nr,
and No are the alphabet of concept names, role names and individual names,
respectively. In order to write second-order formulas, we introduce a set Nx =
X0; X1; X2; ::: of concept variables, which we can quantify over. We denote by
DLX the language of concept terms obtained from DL by adding Nx.</p>
        <sec id="sec-4-1-1">
          <title>De nition 5 (Concept term). A concept term in DLX is a concept formed</title>
          <p>according to the speci c syntax rules of DL augmented with the additional rule
C ! X for X 2 Nx.</p>
          <p>Since we are not interested in second-order DLs as themselves, we restrict our
language to particular existential second-order formulas of interest to this paper.
In particular, we allow formulas involving an ABox. By doing so, we can easily
model the computation of, e.g., the MSC, which was left out as future work
in Colucci et al.'s framework. This paves the way to the modeling of Concept
Learning as shown in the next subsection.</p>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-4-1-2">
          <title>De nition 6 (Concept expression). Let a1; : : : ; am 2 DL be individuals,</title>
          <p>C1; : : : ; Cm; D1; : : : ; Dm 2 DLX be concept terms containing concept variables
X0; X1; : : : ; Xn. A concept expression in DLX is a conjunction
(C1 v D1) ^ : : : ^ (Cl v Dl) ^ (Cl+1 6v Dl+1) ^ : : : ^ (Cm 6v Dm)^
(a1 : D1) ^ : : : ^ (al : Dl) ^ (al+1 : :Dl+1) ^ : : : ^ (am : :Dm)
of (negated or not) concept subsumptions and concept assertions with 1
l</p>
          <p>
            We use General Semantics, also called Henkin semantics, for interpreting
concept variables [
            <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
            ]. In such a semantics, variables denoting unary predicates
can be interpreted only by some subsets among all the ones in the powerset of
the domain 2 I - instead, in Standard Semantics a concept variable could be
interpreted as any subset of I . Adapting General Semantics to our problem,
the structure we consider is exactly the sets interpreting concepts in DL. That
is, the interpretation XI of a concept variable X 2 DLX must coincide with the
interpretation EI of some concept E 2 DL. The interpretations we refer to in
the following de nition are of this kind.
          </p>
          <p>De nition 7 (Satis ability). A concept expression of the form (1) is
satis able in DL i there exist n + 1 concepts E0; : : : ; En 2 DL such that,
extending the semantics of DL for each interpretation I, with: (Xi)I = (Ei)I for
i = 0; : : : ; n, it holds that
1. for each j = 1; : : : ; l, and every interpretation I, (Cj )I (Dj )I and (aj )I 2
(Dj )I , and
2. for each j = l + 1; : : : ; m, there exists an interpretation I s.t. (Cj )I 6 (Dj )I
and (aj )I 62 (Dj )I
Otherwise,</p>
          <p>is said to be unsatis able in DL.</p>
          <p>De nition 8 (Solution). If a concept expression of the form (1) is satis able
in DL, then hE0; : : : ; Eni is a solution for . Moreover, we say that the formula
9X0
9Xn:
is true in DL if there exist at least a solution for
, otherwise it is false.</p>
          <p>(1)
(2)
4.2</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Modeling Concept Learning with Second-Order DLs</title>
        <p>
          It has been pointed out that the constructive reasoning tasks can be divided
into two main categories: tasks for which we just need to compute a concept
(or a set of concepts) and those for which we need to nd a concept (or a set
of concepts) according to some minimality/maximality criteria [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ]. In the rst
case, we have a set of solutions while in the second one we also have a set of
suboptimal solutions to the main problem. E.g., the set of sub-optimal solutions in
LCS is represented by the common subsumers. Both MSC and Concept Learning
belong to this second category of constructive reasoning tasks. We remind the
reader that MSC can be easily reduced to LCS for DLs that admit the one-of
concept constructor. However, this reduction is not trivial for the general case.
Hereafter, rst, we show how to model MSC in terms of formula (2). This step
is to be considered as functional to the modeling of Concept Learning.
Most Speci c Concept Intuitively, the MSC of individuals described in an
ABox is a concept description that represents all the properties of the individuals
including the concept assetions they occur in and their relationship to other
individuals. Similar to the LCS, the MSC is uniquely determined up to equivalence.
More precisely, the set of most speci c concepts of individuals a1; : : : ; ak 2 DL
forms an equivalence class, and if S is de ned to be the set of all concept
descriptions that have a1; : : : ; ak as their instance, then this class is the least element
in [S] w.r.t. a partial ordering on equivalence classes induced by the quasi
ordering v. Analogously to the LCS, we refer to one of its representatives by
MSC(a1; : : : ; ak). The MSC need not exist. Three di erent phenomena may cause
the non existence of a least element in [S], and thus, a MSC:
1. [S] might be empty, or
2. [S] might contain di erent minimal elements, or
3. [S] might contain an in nite decreasing chain [D1]
[D2]
.
        </p>
        <p>A concept E is not the MSC of a1; : : : ; ak i the following formula is true in DL:
9X:(a1 : X) ^ : : : ^ (ak : X) ^ (X v E) ^ (E 6v X)
(3)
that is, E is not the MSC if there exists a concept X which is a most speci c
concept, and is strictly more speci c than E.</p>
        <p>Concept Learning Following Def. 1, we assume that IndC+(A) = fa1; : : : ; amg
and IndC (A) = fb1; : : : ; bng. A concept D 2 DLH is a correct concept de nition
for the target concept name C w.r.t. IndC+(A) and IndC (A) i it is a solution for
the following second-order concept expression:
(C v X) ^ (X v C) ^ (a1 : X) ^ : : : ^ (am : X) ^ (b1 : :X) ^ : : : ^ (bn : :X) (4)
The CSP version of the task is therefore modeled with the following formula.
9X:(C v X)^(X v C)^(a1 : X)^: : :^(am : X)^(b1 : :X)^: : :^(bn : :X) (5)
A simple OP version of the task could be modeled with the formula:
9X:(C v X) ^ (X v C) ^ (X v E) ^ (E 6v X)^
(a1 : X) ^ : : : ^ (am : X) ^ (b1 : :X) ^ : : : ^ (bn : :X)
(6)
which asks for solutions that are compliant with a minimality criterion involving
concept subsumption checks. Therefore, a concept E 2 DLH is not a correct
concept de nition for C w.r.t. IndC+(A) and IndC (A) if there exists a concept X
which is a most speci c concept, and is strictly more speci c than E.
5</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Conclusions</title>
      <p>In this paper, we have provided a formal characterization of Concept Learning
in DLs according to a declarative modeling language which abstracts from the
speci c algorithms used to solve the task. To this purpose, we have de ned a
fragment of second-order logic under the general semantics which allows to
express formulas involving concept assertions from an ABox. One such fragment
enables us to cover the general case of MSC as well. Also, as a minor
contribution, we have suggested that the generalization as search approach to Concept
Learning in Mitchell's vision is just that unifying framework necessary for
accompanying the declarative modeling language proposed in this paper with a way of
computing solutions to the problems declaratively modeled with this language.
More precisely, the computational method we refer to in this paper is based on
the iterative application of suitable re nement operators. Since many re nement
operators for DLs are already available in the literature, the method can be
designed such that it can be instantiated with a re nement operator speci cally
de ned for the DL in hand.</p>
      <p>
        The preliminary results reported in this paper open a promising direction
of research at the intersection of KR and ML. For this research we have taken
inspiration from recent results in both areas. On one hand, Colucci et al.'s work
provides a procedure which combines Tableaux calculi for DLs with rules for
the substitution of concept variables in second-order concept expressions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. On
the other hand, De Raedt et al.'s work shows that o -the-shelf constraint
programming techniques can be applied to various ML problems, once reformulated
as CSPs and OPs [
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inferential problems of interest to the respective elds of research. This match
of research e orts in the two elds has motivated the work presented in this
paper which, therefore, moves a step towards bridging the gap between KR and
ML in areas such as the maintenance of KBs where the two elds have already
produced interesting results though mostly indipendently from each other. New
questions and challenges are raised by the cross-fertilization of these results. In
the future, we intend to investigate how to express optimality criteria such as
the information gain function within the second-order concept expressions and
how the generalization as search approach can be e ectively integrated with
second-order calculus.
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