The connections between symbolic rules and neural networks have been explored in various directions, including rule mining through neural networks and rule-based explanation for neural networks. These approaches allow symbolic rules to be extracted from neural network models, which offers explainability to the models. However, the plausibility of the extracted rules is rarely analysed. In this paper, we show that the confidence degrees of extracted rules are generally not high, and we propose a new family of Graph Neural Networks that can be trained with the guidance of rules. Hence, the inference of our model simulates the rule reasoning. Moreover, rules with high confidence degrees can be extracted from the trained model that aligns with the inference of the model, which verifies the effectiveness of the rule guidance. Experimental evaluation of knowledge graph reasoning tasks further demonstrates the effectiveness of our model.

In software development, the raw requirements proposed by users are frequently incomplete, which impedes the complete implementation of software functionalities. With the emergence of large language models, the exploration of generating software through user requirements has attracted attention. Recent methods with the top-down waterfall model employ a questioning approach for requirement completion, attempting to explore further user requirements. However, users, constrained by their domain knowledge, result in a lack of effective acceptance criteria during the requirement completion, failing to fully capture the implicit needs of the user. Moreover, the cumulative errors of the waterfall model can lead to discrepancies between the generated code and user requirements. The Agile methodologies reduce cumulative errors of the waterfall model through lightweight iteration and collaboration with users, but the challenge lies in ensuring semantic consistency between user requirements and the code generated by the agent. To address these challenges, we propose AgileGen, an agile-based generative software development through human-AI teamwork. Unlike existing questioning agents, AgileGen adopts a novel collaborative approach that breaks free from the constraints of domain knowledge by initiating the end-user perspective to complete the acceptance criteria. By introducing the Gherkin language, AgileGen attempts for the first time to use testable requirement descriptions as a bridge for semantic consistency between requirements and code, aiming to ensure that software products meet actual user requirements by defining user scenarios that include acceptance criteria. Additionally, we innovate in the human-AI teamwork model, allowing users to participate in decision-making processes they do well and significantly enhancing the completeness of software functionality. To ensure semantic consistency between requirements and generated code, we derive consistency factors from Gherkin to drive the subsequent software code generation. Finally, to improve the reliability of user scenarios, we also introduce a memory pool mechanism, collecting user decision-making scenarios and recommending them to new users with similar requirements. AgileGen, as a user-friendly interactive system, significantly outperformed existing best methods by 16.4% and garnered higher user satisfaction.

In commonsense question answering (CSQA), pre-trained language models are often used to generate background knowledge that provides clues to improve the interpretability and performance of CSQA models. However, these methods are often ineffective for generating clues to distinguish similar options, and they also have limitations in using generative capabilities to solve CSQA tasks. In this paper, we propose a new model for CSQA that can differentiate the options for a question more effectively. This model leverages the generative capabilities of the pre-trained model to better understand the relationship between question and candidate options, creating clues that aid in effectively distinguishing choices for the question. Moreover, a mechanism is introduced to encourage the model to discern distinctions among options. Our proposed model demonstrates superior performance on four CSQA datasets, outperforming comparable models.

Existing models for commonsense question answering (CQA) usually focus on combining pre-trained language models (PLMs) and structured knowledge graphs (KGs) for joint reasoning. However, such approaches encode a QA context (i.e., a pair of the question and a choice) separately from other choices, ineffective for explicitly capturing useful subtle differences among the choices, which results in incorrect answers in some cases. This paper proposes a novel model LNC (Learning Nuance among Choices) for addressing this problem and thus provides an improved approach to multiple-choice question answering. Specifically, LNC explicitly interacts between the text knowledge corresponding to each choice and the external KG knowledge corresponding to each choice, and removes the commonalities among similar choices, allowing the model to focus on different relevant knowledge based on the choices, thereby distinguishing semantically similar choices. Experimental results on major benchmark datasets show that LNC is competitive comparing to the baseline models.

Textbook question answering (TQA) task aims to infer answers for given questions from a multimodal context, including text and diagrams. The existing studies have aggregated intramodal semantics extracted from a single modality but have yet to capture the intermodal semantics between different modalities. A major challenge in learning intermodal semantics is maintaining lossless intramodal semantics while bridging the gap of semantics caused by heterogeneity. In this article, we propose an intermodal relation-aware heterogeneous graph network (IMR-HGN) to extract the intermodal semantics for TQA, which aggregates different modalities while learning features rather than representing them independently. First, we design a multidomain consistent representation (MDCR) to eliminate semantic gaps by capturing intermodal features while maintaining lossless intramodal semantics in multidomains. Furthermore, we present neighbor-based relation inpainting (NRI) to reduce semantic ambiguity via repairing fuzzy relations with correlations of relations. Finally, we propose hierarchical multisemantics aggregation (HMSA) to guarantee the completeness of semantics by aggregating features of nodes and relations with a reconstruction network (RN). Experimental results show that IMR-HGN could extract the intermodal semantics of answers, achieving a 2.16% improvement on the validation set of the TQA dataset and a 3.04% increase on the test set of the AI2D dataset.

Tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs or existential rules) are an expressive constraint language for ontology-mediated query answering and thus query answering is of high complexity. Existing systems based on first-order rewriting methods can lead to queries too large for DBMS to handle. It is shown that datalog rewriting can result in more compact queries, yet previously proposed datalog rewriting methods are mostly inefficient for implementation. In this paper, we fill the gap by proposing an efficient datalog rewriting approach for answering conjunctive queries over TGDs, and identify and combine existing fragments of TGDs for which our rewriting method terminates. We implemented a prototype system Drewer, and experiments show that it is able to handle a wide range of benchmarks in the literature. Moreover, Drewer shows superior performance over state-of-the-art systems on both the compactness of rewriting and the efficiency of query answering.

Linjuan Wu, Shaojuan Wu, Xiaowang Zhang, Deyi Xiong, Shizhan Chen, Zhiqiang Zhuang, Zhiyong Feng. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

In this paper, we study an information exchange process in which a network of individuals exchanges a binary opinion.In the process, the individuals change their opinions only if a majority of their neighbours have the opposite opinion and they do it synchronously.Motivated by applications in multiagent systems, distributed computing, and social science, our goal is to derive graphtheoretic features of the network that guarantee whenever a majority of individuals initially have the same opinion, they will eventually spread the opinion to all individuals.We tackle the problem by first introducing a graph-theoretic notion called controlling set which is capable of characterising the information exchange process and, by exploiting the notion, we obtain a series of lower and upper bounds on the in-degree of vertices as well as lower bound on the size of certain neighbourhoods for guaranteeing the majority to unanimity behaviour.

Existential rules are an expressive ontology formalism for ontology-mediated query answering and thus query answering is of high complexity, while several tractable fragments have been identified. Existing systems based on first-order rewriting methods can lead to queries too large for DBMS to handle. It is shown that datalog rewriting can result in more compact queries, yet previously proposed datalog rewriting methods are mostly inefficient for implementation. In this paper, we fill the gap by proposing an efficient datalog rewriting approach for answering conjunctive queries over existential rules, and identify and combine existing fragments of existential rules for which our rewriting method terminates. We implemented a prototype system Drewer, and experiments show that it is able to handle a wide range of benchmarks in the literature. Moreover, Drewer shows superior or comparable performance over state-of-the-art systems on both the compactness of rewriting and the efficiency of query answering.

AGM contraction and revision assume an underlying logic that contains propositional logic. Consequently, this assumption excludes many useful logics such as the Horn fragment of propositional logic and most description logics. Our goal in this paper is to generalise AGM contraction and revision to (near-)arbitrary fragments of classical first-order logic. To this end, we first define a very general logic that captures these fragments. In so doing, we make the modest assumptions that a logic contains conjunction and that information is expressed by closed formulas or sentences. The resulting logic is called first-order conjunctive logic or FC logic for short. We then take as the point of departure the AGM approach of constructing contraction functions through epistemic entrenchment, that is the entrenchment-based contraction. We redefine entrenchment-based contraction in ways that apply to any FC logic, which we call FC contraction. We prove a representation theorem showing its compliance with all the AGM contraction postulates except for the controversial recovery postulate. We also give methods for constructing revision functions through epistemic entrenchment which we call FC revision; which also apply to any FC logic. We show that if the underlying FC logic contains tautologies then FC revision complies with all the AGM revision postulates. Finally, in the context of FC logic, we provide three methods for generating revision functions via a variant of the Levi Identity, which we call contraction, withdrawal and cut generated revision, and explore the notion of revision equivalence. We show that withdrawal and cut generated revision coincide with FC revision and so does contraction generated revision under a finiteness condition.

Recent methods have adapted the well-established AGM and belief base frameworks for belief change to cover belief revision in logic programs. In this study here, we present two new sets of belief change operators for logic programs. They focus on preserving the explicit relationships expressed in the rules of a program, a feature that is missing in purely semantic approaches that consider programs only in their entirety. In particular, operators of the latter class fail to satisfy preservation and support, two important properties for belief change in logic programs required to ensure intuitive results. We address this shortcoming of existing approaches by introducing partial meet and ensconcement constructions for logic program belief change, which allow us to define syntax-preserving operators for satisfying preservation and support. Our work is novel in that our constructions not only preserve more information from a logic program during a change operation than existing ones, but they also facilitate natural definitions of contraction operators, the first in the field to the best of our knowledge. To evaluate the rationality of our operators, we translate the revision and contraction postulates from the AGM and belief base frameworks to the logic programming setting. We show that our operators fully comply with the belief base framework and formally state the interdefinability between our operators. We further compare our approach to two state-of-the-art logic program revision methods and demonstrate that our operators address the shortcomings of one and generalise the other method.

In this paper we provide a general, unifying framework for probabilistic belief revision. We first introduce a probabilistic logic called p-logic that is capable of representing and reasoning with basic probabilistic information. With p-logic as the background logic, we define a revision function called p-revision that resembles partial meet revision in the AGM framework. We provide a representation theorem for p-revision which shows that it can be characterised by the set of basic AGM revision postulates. P-revision represents an "all purpose" method for revising probabilistic information that can be used for, but not limited to, the revision problems behind Bayesian conditionalisation, Jeffrey conditionalisation, and Lewis's imaging. Importantly, p-revision subsumes all three approaches indicating that Bayesian conditionalisation, Jeffrey conditionalisation, and Lewis' imaging all obey the basic principles of AGM revision. As well our investigation sheds light on the corresponding operation of AGM expansion in the probabilistic setting.

Belief revision has been studied mainly with respect to background logics that are monotonic in character. In this paper we study belief revision when the underlying logic is non-monotonic instead—an inherently interesting problem that is under explored. In particular, we will focus on the revision of a body of beliefs that is represented as a logic program under the answer set semantics, while the new information is also similarly represented as a logic program. Our approach is driven by the observation that unlike in a monotonic setting where, when necessary, consistency in a revised body of beliefs is maintained by jettisoning some old beliefs, in a non-monotonic setting consistency can be restored by adding new beliefs as well. We will define two revision functions through syntactic and model-theoretic methods respectively and subsequently provide representation theorems for characterising them.

Two essential tasks in managing description logic knowledge bases are eliminating problematic axioms and incorporating newly formed ones. Such elimination and incorporation are formalised as the operations of contraction and revision in belief change. In this paper, we deal with contraction and revision for the DL-Lite family through a model-theoretic approach. Standard description logic semantics yields an infinite number of models for DL-Lite knowledge bases, thus it is difficult to develop algorithms for contraction and revision that involve DL models. The key to our approach is the introduction of an alternative semantics called type semantics which can replace the standard semantics in characterising the standard inference tasks of DL-Lite. Type semantics has several advantages over the standard one. It is more succinct and importantly, with a finite signature, the semantics always yields a finite number of models. We then define model-based contraction and revision functions for DL-Lite knowledge bases under type semantics and provide representation theorems for them. Finally, the finiteness and succinctness of type semantics allow us to develop tractable algorithms for instantiating the functions.

The recent years have seen several proposals aimed at placing the revision of logic programs within the belief change frameworks established for classical logic. A crucial challenge of this task lies in the nonmonotonicity of standard logic programming semantics. Existing approaches have thus used the monotonic characterisation via SE-models to develop semantic revision operators, which however neglect any syntactic information, or reverted to a syntax-oriented belief base approach altogether. In this paper, we bridge the gap between semantic and syntactic techniques by adapting the idea of a partial meet construction from classical belief change. This type of construction allows us to define new model-based operators for revising as well as contracting logic programs that preserve the syntactic structure of the programs involved. We demonstrate the rationality of our operators by testing them against the classic AGM or alternative belief change postulates adapted to the logic programming setting. We further present an algorithm that reduces the partial meet revision or contraction of a logic program to performing revision or contraction only on the relevant subsets of that program.

Model-based approaches provide a semantically well justified way to revise ontologies. However, in general, model-based revision operators are limited due to lack of efficient algorithms and inexpressibility of the revision results. In this paper, we make both theoretical and practical contribution to efficient computation of model-based revisions in DL-Lite. Specifically, we show that maximal approximations of two well-known model-based revisions for DL-Lite_R can be computed using a syntactic algorithm. However, such a coincidence of model-based and syntactic approaches does not hold when role functionality axioms are allowed. As a result, we identify conditions that guarantee such a coincidence for DL-Lite_FR. Our result shows that both model-based and syntactic revisions can co-exist seamlessly and the advantages of both approaches can be taken in one revision operator. Based on our theoretical results, we develop a graph-based algorithm for the revision operat

The theory of (variable) forgetting has received significant attention in nonmonotonic reasoning, especially, in answer set programming. However, the problem of establishing a theory of forgetting for some expressive nonmonotonic logics such as McCarthy's circumscription is rarely explored.In this paper a theory of forgetting for propositional circumscription is proposed, which is not a straightforward adaption of existing approaches. In particular, some properties that are essential for existing proposals do not hold any longer or have to be reformulated. Several useful properties of the new forgetting are proved, which demonstrate suitability of the forgetting for circumscription. A sound and complete algorithm for the forgetting is developed and an analysis of computational complexity is given.

The development and maintenance of large and complex ontologies are often time-consuming and error-prone. Thus, automated ontology learning and evolution have attracted intensive research interest. In data-centric applications where ontologies are designed from the data or automatically learnt from it, when new data instances are added that contradict the ontology, it is often desirable to incrementally revise the ontology according to the added data. In description logics, this problem can be intuitively formulated as the operation of TBox contraction, i.e., rational elimination of certain axioms from the logical consequences of a TBox, and it is w.r.t. an ABox. In this paper we introduce a model-theoretic approach to such a contraction problem by using an alternative semantic characterisation of DL-Lite TBoxes. We show that entailment checking (without necessarily first computing the contraction result) is in coNP, which does not shift the corresponding complexity in propositional logic, and the problem is tractable when the size of the new data is bounded.

Two essential tasks in managing Description Logic (DL) ontologies are eliminating problematic axioms and incorporating newly formed axioms. Such elimination and incorporation are formalised as the operations of contraction and revision in belief change.In this paper, we deal with contraction and revision for the DL-Lite family through a model-theoretic approach.Standard DL semantics yields infinite numbers of models for DL-Lite TBoxes, thus it is not practical to develop algorithms for contraction and revision that involve DL models. The key to our approach is the introduction of an alternative semantics called type semantics which is more succinct than DL semantics. More importantly, with a finite signature, type semantics always yields finite humber of models.We then define model-based contraction and revision for DL-Lite TBoxesunder type semantics and provide representation theorems for them.Finally, the succinctness of type semantics allows us to develop tractable algorithms for both operations.

The AGM framework is the benchmark approach in belief change. Since the framework assumes an underlying logic containing classical Propositional Logic, it can not be applied to systems with a logic weaker than Propositional Logic. To remedy this limitation, several researchers have studied AGM-style contraction and revision under the Horn fragment of Propositional Logic (i.e., Horn logic). In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by investigating the Horn version of the AGM entrenchment-based contraction. The study is challenging as the construction of entrenchment-based contraction refers to arbitrary disjunctions which are not expressible under Horn logic. In order to adapt the construction to Horn logic, we make use of a Horn approximation technique called Horn strengthening. We provide a representation theorem for the newly constructed contraction which we refer to as entrenchment-based Horn contraction. Ideally, contractions defined under Horn logic (i.e., Horn contractions) should be as rational as AGM contraction. We propose the notion of Horn equivalence which intuitively captures the equivalence between Horn contraction and AGM contraction. We show that, under this notion, entrenchment-based Horn contraction is equivalent to a restricted form of entrenchment-based contraction.