Tags:Description Logics, Explanation and Propositional satisfiability
Abstract:
Propositional SAT solvers have been a popular way of computing justifications for ontological entailment -- minimal subsets of axioms of the ontologies that entail a given conclusion. Most SAT encodings proposed for Description Logics (DLs), translate the inferences obtained by a consequence-based procedure to propositional Horn clauses, using which entailments from subsets of axioms can be effectively checked, and use modified SAT solvers to systematically search over these subsets. To avoid repeated discovery of subsets with already checked entailment, the modified SAT solvers add special blocking clauses that prevent generating truth assignments corresponding to these subsets, the number of which can be exponential, even if the number of justifications is small. In this paper, we propose alternative SAT encodings that avoid generation of unnecessary blocking clauses. Unlike the previous methods, the inferences are used not only for checking entailment from subsets of axioms, but also, as a part of the encoding, to ensure that the SAT solver generates truth assignments corresponding only to justifications.