Humans develop a common sense of style compatibility between items based on their attributes. We seek to automatically answer questions like “Does this shirt go well with that pair of jeans?” In order to answer these kinds of questions, we attempt to model human sense of style compatibility in this paper. The basic assumption of our approach is that most of the important attributes for a produc...

In this paper, we present a syntactic method for solving firstorder equational constraints over term algebras. The presented method exploits a novel notion of quasi-solved form that we call answer. By allowing a restricted form of universal quantification, answers provide a more compact way to represent solutions than the purely existential solved forms found in the literature. Answers have bee...

A truly natural language interface needs to be feasible for actual implementation. We developed such a new approach for database query and tested it successfully in a laboratory environment. The new result is based on metadata search, where the metadata grow in largely linear manner and the search is linguistics-free (allowing for grammatically incorrect and incomplete input). A new class of re...

To enable ontology reuse, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) allows an ontology Kv to import an ontologyKh. To reason with such a Kv , a reasoner needs physical access to the axioms of Kh. For copyright and/or privacy reasons, however, the authors ofKh might not want to publish the axioms of Kh; instead, they might prefer to provide an oracle that can answer a (limited) set of queries over Kh, thu...