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Causal questions inquire about causal relationships between different events or phenomena. They are important for a variety of use cases, including virtual assistants and search engines. However, many current approaches to causal question answering cannot provide explanations or evidence for their answers. Hence, in this paper, we aim to answer causal questions with a causality graph, a large-scale dataset of causal relations between noun phrases along with the relations' provenance data. Inspired by recent, successful applications of reinforcement learning to knowledge graph tasks, such as link prediction and fact-checking, we explore the application of reinforcement learning on a causality graph for causal question answering. We introduce an Actor-Critic-based agent which learns to search through the graph to answer causal questions. We bootstrap the agent with a supervised learning procedure to deal with large action spaces and sparse rewards. Our evaluation shows that the agent successfully prunes the search space to answer binary causal questions by visiting less than 30 nodes per question compared to over 3,000 nodes by a naive breadth-first search. Our ablation study indicates that our supervised learning strategy provides a strong foundation upon which our reinforcement learning agent improves. The paths returned by our agent explain the mechanisms by which a cause produces an effect. Moreover, for each edge on a path, our causality graph provides its original source allowing for easy verification of paths., Comment: Accepted at WWW 2024

Knowledge bases are widely used for information management, enabling high-impact applications such as web search, question answering, and natural language processing. They also serve as the backbone for automatic decision systems, e.g., for medical diagnostics and credit scoring. As stakeholders affected by these decisions would like to understand their situation and verify how fair the decisions are, a number of explanation approaches have been proposed. An intrinsically transparent way to do classification is by using concepts in description logics. However, these concepts can become long and difficult to fathom for non-experts, even when verbalized. One solution is to employ counterfactuals to answer the question, ``How must feature values be changed to obtain a different classification?'' By focusing on the minimal feature changes, the explanations are short, human-friendly, and provide a clear path of action regarding the change in prediction. While previous work investigated counterfactuals for tabular data, in this paper, we transfer the notion of counterfactuals to knowledge bases and the description logic $\mathcal{ELH}$. Our approach starts by generating counterfactual candidates from concepts, followed by selecting the candidates requiring the fewest feature changes as counterfactuals. When multiple counterfactuals exist, we rank them based on the likeliness of their feature combinations. We evaluate our method by conducting a user survey to determine which counterfactual candidates participants prefer for explanation.

Classifying nodes in knowledge graphs is an important task, e.g., for predicting missing types of entities, predicting which molecules cause cancer, or predicting which drugs are promising treatment candidates. While black-box models often achieve high predictive performance, they are only post-hoc and locally explainable and do not allow the learned model to be easily enriched with domain knowledge. Towards this end, learning description logic concepts from positive and negative examples has been proposed. However, learning such concepts often takes a long time and state-of-the-art approaches provide limited support for literal data values, although they are crucial for many applications. In this paper, we propose EvoLearner - an evolutionary approach to learn concepts in ALCQ(D), which is the attributive language with complement (ALC) paired with qualified cardinality restrictions (Q) and data properties (D). We contribute a novel initialization method for the initial population: starting from positive examples, we perform biased random walks and translate them to description logic concepts. Moreover, we improve support for data properties by maximizing information gain when deciding where to split the data. We show that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art on the benchmarking framework SML-Bench for structured machine learning. Our ablation study confirms that this is due to our novel initialization method and support for data properties., Comment: Accepted at WWW 2022

Concept learning approaches based on refinement operators explore partially ordered solution spaces to compute concepts, which are used as binary classification models for individuals. However, the number of concepts explored by these approaches can grow to the millions for complex learning problems. This often leads to impractical runtimes. We propose to alleviate this problem by predicting the length of target concepts before the exploration of the solution space. By these means, we can prune the search space during concept learning. To achieve this goal, we compare four neural architectures and evaluate them on four benchmarks. Our evaluation results suggest that recurrent neural network architectures perform best at concept length prediction with a macro F-measure ranging from 38% to 92%. We then extend the CELOE algorithm, which learns ALC concepts, with our concept length predictor. Our extension yields the algorithm CLIP. In our experiments, CLIP is at least 7.5 times faster than other state-of-the-art concept learning algorithms for ALC -- including CELOE -- and achieves significant improvements in the F-measure of the concepts learned on 3 out of 4 datasets. For reproducibility, we provide our implementation in the public GitHub repository at https://github.com/dice-group/LearnALCLengths., Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables

Knowledge graph embedding research has mainly focused on the two smallest normed division algebras, $\mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{C}$. Recent results suggest that trilinear products of quaternion-valued embeddings can be a more effective means to tackle link prediction. In addition, models based on convolutions on real-valued embeddings often yield state-of-the-art results for link prediction. In this paper, we investigate a composition of convolution operations with hypercomplex multiplications. We propose the four approaches QMult, OMult, ConvQ and ConvO to tackle the link prediction problem. QMult and OMult can be considered as quaternion and octonion extensions of previous state-of-the-art approaches, including DistMult and ComplEx. ConvQ and ConvO build upon QMult and OMult by including convolution operations in a way inspired by the residual learning framework. We evaluated our approaches on seven link prediction datasets including WN18RR, FB15K-237 and YAGO3-10. Experimental results suggest that the benefits of learning hypercomplex-valued vector representations become more apparent as the size and complexity of the knowledge graph grows. ConvO outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on FB15K-237 in MRR, Hit@1 and Hit@3, while QMult, OMult, ConvQ and ConvO outperform state-of-the-approaches on YAGO3-10 in all metrics. Results also suggest that link prediction performances can be further improved via prediction averaging. To foster reproducible research, we provide an open-source implementation of approaches, including training and evaluation scripts as well as pretrained models.