Chair for Automata Theory of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden

Technical Reports

2012


Franz Baader and Alexander Okhotin. Solving Language Equations and Disequations Using Looping Tree Automata with Colors. LTCS-Report 12-01, Chair of Automata Theory, Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 2012. See http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/research/reports.html.
Bibtex entry  Paper (PDF)

Abstract

We extend previous results on the complexity of solving language equations with one-sided concatenation and all Boolean operations to the case where also disequations (i.e., negated equations) may occur. To show that solvability of systems of equations and disequations is still in ExpTime, we introduce a new type of automata working on infinite trees, which we call looping automata with colors. As applications of these results, we show new complexity results for disunification in the description logic FL0 and for monadic set constraints with negation. We believe that looping automata with colors may also turn out to be useful in other applications.


Franz Baader, Stefan Borgwardt, and Barbara Morawska. SAT Encoding of Unification in ELH_R^+ w.r.t. Cycle-Restricted Ontologies. LTCS-Report 12-02, Chair for Automata Theory, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 2012. See http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/research/reports.html.
Bibtex entry  Paper (PDF)

Abstract

Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as an inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. For the Description Logic EL, which is used to define several large biomedical ontologies, unification is NP-complete. An NP unification algorithm for EL based on a translation into propositional satisfiability (SAT) has recently been presented. In this report, we extend this SAT encoding in two directions: on the one hand, we add general concept inclusion axioms, and on the other hand, we add role hierarchies (H) and transitive roles (R+). For the translation to be complete, however, the ontology needs to satisfy a certain cycle restriction. The SAT translation depends on a new rewriting-based characterization of subsumption w.r.t. ELHR+-ontologies.


Franz Baader, Stefan Borgwardt, and Barbara Morawska. Computing Minimal EL-Unifiers is Hard. LTCS-Report 12-03, Chair for Automata Theory, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 2012. See http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/research/reports.html.
Bibtex entry  Paper (PDF)

Abstract

Unification has been investigated both in modal logics and in description logics, albeit with different motivations. In description logics, unification can be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. In this context, it is not sufficient to decide unifiability, one must also compute appropriate unifiers and present them to the user. For the description logic EL, which is used to define several large biomedical ontologies, deciding unifiability is an NP-complete problem. It is known that every solvable EL-unification problem has a minimal unifier, and that every minimal unifier is a local unifier. Existing unification algorithms for EL compute all minimal unifiers, but additionally (all or some) non-minimal local unifiers. Computing only the minimal unifiers would be better since there are considerably less minimal unifiers than local ones, and their size is usually also quite small. In this paper we investigate the question whether the known algorithms for EL-unification can be modified such that they compute exactly the minimal unifiers without changing the complexity and the basic nature of the algorithms. Basically, the answer we give to this question is negative.


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