Daphne Koller , Alon Levy , Avi Pfeffer , P-Classic: a tractable probabilistic description logic Proceedings of the AAAI Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1997
Abstract: Knowledge representation languages invariably reflect a trade-off
between expressivity and tractability. Evidence suggests
that the compromise chosen by description logics is a particularly
successful one. However, description logic (as for all variants of
first-order logic) is severely limited in its ability to express
uncertainty. In this paper, we present Pclassic, a
probabilistic version of the description logic \classic. In addition
to terminological knowledge, the language utilizes
Bayesian networks to express uncertainty about the basic properties
of an individual, the number of fillers for its roles, and the
properties of these fillers. We provide a semantics for Pclassic
and an effective inference procedure for probabilistic subsumption:
computing the probability that a random individual
in class C is also in class D. The effectiveness of the algorithm
relies on independence assumptions and on our ability
to execute lifted inference: reasoning about similar
individuals as a group rather than as separate ground terms.
We show that the complexity of the inference algorithm is the best that can
be hoped for in a language that combines description logic with Bayesian
networks. In particular, if we restrict to Bayesian networks that
support polynomial time inference, the complexity of our inference
procedure is also polynomial time.