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Recently, explanations for query answers under existential rules have been investigated, where an explanation is an inclusion-minimal subset of a given database that, together with the ontology, entails the query. In this paper, we take a step further and study explanations under different minimality criteria. In particular, we first study cardinality-minimal explanations and hence focus on deriving explanations of minimum size. We then study a more general preference order induced by a weight distribution. We assume that every database fact is annotated with a (penalization) weight, and we are interested in explanations with minimum overall weight. For both preference orders, we study a variety of explanation problems, such as recognizing a preferred explanation, all preferred explanations, a relevant or necessary fact, and the existence of a preferred explanation not containing forbidden sets of facts. We provide a detailed complexity analysis for all the aforementioned problems, thereby providing a more complete picture for explaining query answers under existential rules.

Ontology-mediated query answering is a paradigm that seeks to exploit the semantic knowledge expressed in terms of ontologies to improve query answers over incomplete data sources. In this paper, we focus on description logic ontologies, and study the problem of explaining why an ontology-mediated query is entailed from a given data source. Specifically, we view explanations as minimal sets of assertions from an ABox, which satisfy the ontologymediated query. Based on such explanations, we study a variety of problems taken from the recent literature on explanations (studied for existential rules), such as recognizing all minimal explanations. Our results establish tight connections between intractable explanation problems and variants of propositional satisfiability problems. We provide insights on the inherent computational difficulty of deriving explanations for ontology-mediated queries.

We study the problem of probabilistic query evaluation (PQE) over probabilistic graphs, namely, tuple-independent probabilistic databases (TIDs) on signatures of arity two. Our focus is the class of queries that is closed under homomorphisms, or equivalently, the infinite unions of conjunctive queries, denoted UCQ∞. Our main result states that all unbounded queries in UCQ∞ are #P-hard for PQE. As bounded queries in UCQ∞ are already classified by the dichotomy of Dalvi and Suciu [Dalvi and Suciu, 2012], our results and theirs imply a complete dichotomy on PQE for UCQ∞ queries over probabilistic graphs. This dichotomy covers in particular all fragments in UCQ∞ such as negation-free (disjunctive) Datalog, regular path queries, and a large class of ontology-mediated queries on arity-two signatures. Our result is shown by reducing from counting the valuations of positive partitioned 2-DNF formulae (#PP2DNF) for some queries, or from the source-to-target reliability problem in an undirected graph (#U-ST-CON) for other queries, depending on properties of minimal models.

We study the query evaluation problem in probabilistic databases in the presence of probabilistic existential rules. Our focus is on the Datalog± family of languages for which we define the probabilistic counterpart using a flexible and compact encoding of probabilities. This formalism can be viewed as a generalization of probabilistic databases, as it allows to generate new facts from the given ones, using so-called tuple-generating dependencies, or existential rules. We study the computational cost of this additional expressiveness under two different semantics. First, we use a conventional approach and assume that the probabilistic knowledge base is consistent and employ the standard possible world semantics. Thereafter, we introduce a probabilistic inconsistency-tolerant semantics, which we call inconsistency-tolerant possible world semantics. For both of these cases, we provide a thorough complexity analysis relative to different languages, drawing a complete picture of the complexity of probabilistic query answering in this family.

BEL is a probabilistic description logic (DL) that extends the light-weight DL EL with a joint probability distribution over the axioms, expressed with the help of a Bayesian network (BN). In recent work it has been shown that the complexity of standard logical reasoning in BEL is the same as performing probabilistic inferences over the BN. In this paper we consider conjunctive query answering in BEL. We study the complexity of the three main problems associated to this setting: computing the probability of a query entailment, computing the most probable answers to a query, and computing the most probable context in which a query is entailed. In particular, we show that all these problems are tractable w.r.t. data and ontology complexity.

We present Bayesian Description Logics (BDLs): an extension of Description Logics (DLs) with contextual probabilities encoded in a Bayesian network (BN). Classical DL reasoning tasks are extended to consider also the contextual and probabilistic information in BDLs. A complexity analysis of these problems shows that, for propositionally closed DLs, this extension comes without cost, while for tractable DLs the complexity is affected by the cost of reasoning in the BN.

We introduce the probabilistic Description Logic BEL. In BEL, axioms are required to hold only in an associated context. The probabilistic component of the logic is given by a Bayesian network that describes the joint probability distribution of the contexts. We study the main reasoning problems in this logic; in particular, we (i) prove that deciding positive and almost-sure entailments is not harder for BEL than for the BN, and (ii) show how to compute the probability, and the most likely context for a consequence.

Fuzzy answer set programming (FASP) combines two declarative frameworks, answer set programming and fuzzy logic, in order to model reasoning by default over imprecise information. Several connectives are available to combine different expressions; in particular the G¨odel and Lukasiewicz fuzzy connectives are usually considered, due to their properties. Although the G¨odel conjunction can be easily eliminated from rule heads, we show through complexity arguments that such a simplification is infeasible in general for all other connectives. The paper analyzes a translation of FASP programs into satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), which in general produces quantified formulas because of the minimality of the semantics. Structural properties of many FASP programs allow to eliminate the quantification, or to sensibly reduce the number of quantified variables. Indeed, integrality constraints can replace recursive rules commonly used to force Boolean interpretations, and completion subformulas can guarantee minimality for acyclic programs with atomic heads. Moreover, head cycle free rules can be replaced by shifted subprograms, whose structure depends on the eliminated head connective, so that ordered completion may replace the minimality check if also Lukasiewicz disjunction in rule bodies is acyclic. The paper also presents and evaluates a prototype system implementing these translations.