Learning the Parameters of Probabilistic Description Logics

Uncertain information is ubiquitous in the Semantic Web, due to methods used for collecting data and to the inherently distributed nature of the data sources. It is thus very important to develop probabilistic Description Logics (DLs) so that the uncertainty is directly represented and managed at the language level. The DISPONTE semantics for probabilistic DLs applies the distribution semantics of probabilistic logic programming to DLs. In DISPONTE, axioms are labeled with numeric parameters representing their probability. These are often difficult to specify or to tune for a human. On the other hand, data is usually available that can be leveraged for setting the parameters. In this paper, we present EDGE that learns the parameters of DLs following the DISPONTE semantics. EDGE is an EM algorithm in which the required expectations are computed directly on the binary decision diagrams that are built for inference. Experiments on two datasets show that EDGE achieves higher areas under the Precision Recall and ROC curves than an association rule learner in a comparable or smaller time.