Komplexpraktikum/Project in WS 2013/2014

Technische Universität Dresden Institut für Theoretische Informatik Lehrstuhl für Automatentheorie

Initial meeting

takes place on October 18th at 10:30 in Room INF-3027. Attending the initial meeting is mandatory for participation in the praktikum/project.
People who want to participate in the praktikum/project, but have serious reasons to not attend the initial meeting, please contact Rafael Peñaloza before October 17.

Position in curriculum

- Diplomstudiengang Informatik (Diplom- und Bakkalaureatsabschluß), ab 5. Semester; Wahlpflichtveranstaltung (-/-/4)
- Course of studies Computation Logic; project (12 credits)

Prerequisites

for computer scientists: Pflichtvorlesung "Grundlagen der Theoretischen Informatik"

Organisation

-There will be an initial meeting (see above) where different topics will be proposed to the students. Students can chose from the offered topics, one to work on.
- Students interested in doing their project, but unable to assist to the initial meeting should contact Rafael Peñaloza to discuss possible solutions.
- Each student is assigned a tutor, depending on the topic chosen. During the semester, there will be regular meetings of the student and his tutor.
- The results of the praktikum/project will be presented at the end of the semester in a talk given by the student.

Language

Concerning the final presentations, students may choose to present their work in German or in English.

Participants Duties

The participants are expected to read the relevant literature, and to discuss it with their tutor in order to become acquainted with the topic chosen. The required implementation work (if any) should be carried out in a structured way, and has to be documented appropriately. If a topic is shared by two or more participants, acquiring team-working skills is another goal of the project. The results of the project have to be described in a project paper (~15 pages) and presented in a 30 minutes talk at the end of the semester.

It is also the duty of the participants to reserve enough time for performing the project. The sharp deadline for finishing the project is the beginning of the following semester, i.e. the allowed time for the project is one semester plus the following semester break. Failure to finish the project in time will result in no credits to be given. It is the obligation of the participant to start the project in time, and to make appointments with the supervisor for regular meetings during the semester.

Topics

When choosing a topic, please take into account the knowledge you have already acquired. For example, if you'd like to do a project concerning knowledge representation, you are expected to have successfully attended the lecture "Logic-based knowledge representation" before starting the project.

(1) Finite Herbrand Models for Horn Clauses

Deciding the existence of finite Herbrand models for certain sets of first-order anti-Horn clauses is ExpTime-complete. The aim of this project is to analyze the computational complexity of the same problem for Horn clauses by finding a hardness proof and/or a decision procedure.
This project requires basic knowledge about first-order logic and complexity theory.

Tutor: Stefan Borgwardt

(2) Finite Herbrand Models for anti-Horn Clauses

The aim of this project is to implement and optimize an algorithm for deciding the existence of finite Herbrand models for certain sets of first-order anti-Horn clauses. The program should be evaluated on a representative set of input problems. The programming language can be chosen by the student.
This project requires basic knowledge about first-order logic and good programming skills.

Tutor: Stefan Borgwardt

(3) Generating Concept Definitions in Description Logics from Texts

The project aims to develop a graphic user interface (e.g. Protege plugin) which takes a text and some concept name as input and outputs the Description logic definition for the concept name extracted from the texts. A particular feature that such a system should have is to keep the link from texts to the extracted concept definitions, which makes users able to trace the concept definition generation process. As the components of this work, our approaches proposed in [1,2] will be first integrated into the system to generate a definition extraction model on training data, and then such a model is used on new input texts to extract Description Logic definitions of a new appearing concept in biomedical domain.
References
[1] Yue Ma, Felix Distel. Learning Formal Definitions for Snomed CT from Text. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (2013)
[2] Yue Ma, Felix Distel. Concept Adjustment for Description Logics. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Knowledge Capture. (2013)

This implementation topic requires good programming skills

Tutor: Yue Ma

(4) Detecting Logical Differences Using Hypergraphs

The aim of this project is to implement a new tool for detecting logical differences (w.r.t. concept subsumption queries) based on a newly-developed approach to the logical difference problem using a hypergraph representation of ontologies [1]. Once a difference has been detected the tool should also be able to compute example concept subsumption queries that illustrate the difference. Ideally, the tool should also be able to interconnect with the OWL-API [2], which would allow for easier integration into popular ontology editors such as Protege.
References
[[1] Andreas Ecke, Michel Ludwig, and Dirk Walther: The Concept Difference for EL-Terminologies using Hypergraphs. In Proceedings of the International workshop on (Document) Changes: modeling, detection, storage and visualization (DChanges 2013), volume 1008 of in CEUR-WS, 2013
[2] http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/

This implementation topic requires good programming skills. Knowledge of JAVA is preferred.

Tutor: Michel Ludwig

(5) The Cost of Rough Reasoning

In this project, the student is expected to design, implement and execute different tests for evaluating the practical cost of adding support to new constructors into a reasoner. As a guiding example, the cost of adding support of rough logical constructors is to be analysed. A deep statistical analysis and understanding of the obtained data is expected.

A basic knowledge of statistical tools and methods is desired, but not mandatory.

Tutor: Rafael Peñaloza

More topics t.b.a.