Fast approximate A-box consistency checking using machine learning

Abstract

Ontology reasoning is typically a computationally intensive operation. While soundness and completeness of results is required in some use cases, for many others, a sensible trade-off between computation efforts and correctness of results makes more sense. In this paper, we show that it is possible to approximate a central task in reasoning, i.e., A-box consistency checking, by training a machine learning model which approximates the behavior of that reasoner for a specific ontology. On four different datasets, we show that such learned models constantly achieve an accuracy above 95% at less than 2% of the runtime of a reasoner, using a decision tree with no more than 20 inner nodes. For example, this allows for validating 293M Microdata documents against the schema.org ontology in less than 90 min, compared to 18 days required by a state of the art ontology reasoner.