A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bienvenu, Meghyn, Bourgaux, Camille, Inoue, Katsumi, Jean, Robin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917099325095936
author Bienvenu, Meghyn
Bourgaux, Camille
Inoue, Katsumi
Jean, Robin
author_facet Bienvenu, Meghyn
Bourgaux, Camille
Inoue, Katsumi
Jean, Robin
contents Repair-based semantics have been extensively studied as a means of obtaining meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent knowledge bases (KBs). While several works have considered how to exploit a priority relation between facts to select optimal repairs, the question of how to specify such preferences remains largely unaddressed. This motivates us to introduce a declarative rule-based framework for specifying and computing a priority relation between conflicting facts. As the expressed preferences may contain undesirable cycles, we consider the problem of determining when a set of preference rules always yields an acyclic relation, and we also explore a pragmatic approach that extracts an acyclic relation by applying various cycle removal techniques. Towards an end-to-end system for querying inconsistent KBs, we present a preliminary implementation and experimental evaluation of the framework, which employs answer set programming to evaluate the preference rules, apply the desired cycle resolution techniques to obtain a priority relation, and answer queries under prioritized-repair semantics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07742
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases
Bienvenu, Meghyn
Bourgaux, Camille
Inoue, Katsumi
Jean, Robin
Logic in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Repair-based semantics have been extensively studied as a means of obtaining meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent knowledge bases (KBs). While several works have considered how to exploit a priority relation between facts to select optimal repairs, the question of how to specify such preferences remains largely unaddressed. This motivates us to introduce a declarative rule-based framework for specifying and computing a priority relation between conflicting facts. As the expressed preferences may contain undesirable cycles, we consider the problem of determining when a set of preference rules always yields an acyclic relation, and we also explore a pragmatic approach that extracts an acyclic relation by applying various cycle removal techniques. Towards an end-to-end system for querying inconsistent KBs, we present a preliminary implementation and experimental evaluation of the framework, which employs answer set programming to evaluate the preference rules, apply the desired cycle resolution techniques to obtain a priority relation, and answer queries under prioritized-repair semantics.
title A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases
topic Logic in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07742