Investigating Language Model Capabilities to Represent and Process Formal Knowledge: A Preliminary Study to Assist Ontology Engineering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Akl, Hanna Abi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Akl, Hanna Abi
author_facet Akl, Hanna Abi
contents Recent advances in Language Models (LMs) have failed to mask their shortcomings particularly in the domain of reasoning. This limitation impacts several tasks, most notably those involving ontology engineering. As part of a PhD research, we investigate the consequences of incorporating formal methods on the performance of Small Language Models (SLMs) on reasoning tasks. Specifically, we aim to orient our work toward using SLMs to bootstrap ontology construction and set up a series of preliminary experiments to determine the impact of expressing logical problems with different grammars on the performance of SLMs on a predefined reasoning task. Our findings show that it is possible to substitute Natural Language (NL) with a more compact logical language while maintaining a strong performance on reasoning tasks and hope to use these results to further refine the role of SLMs in ontology engineering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10249
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Language Model Capabilities to Represent and Process Formal Knowledge: A Preliminary Study to Assist Ontology Engineering
Akl, Hanna Abi
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in Language Models (LMs) have failed to mask their shortcomings particularly in the domain of reasoning. This limitation impacts several tasks, most notably those involving ontology engineering. As part of a PhD research, we investigate the consequences of incorporating formal methods on the performance of Small Language Models (SLMs) on reasoning tasks. Specifically, we aim to orient our work toward using SLMs to bootstrap ontology construction and set up a series of preliminary experiments to determine the impact of expressing logical problems with different grammars on the performance of SLMs on a predefined reasoning task. Our findings show that it is possible to substitute Natural Language (NL) with a more compact logical language while maintaining a strong performance on reasoning tasks and hope to use these results to further refine the role of SLMs in ontology engineering.
title Investigating Language Model Capabilities to Represent and Process Formal Knowledge: A Preliminary Study to Assist Ontology Engineering
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10249