Tight complexity bounds for reasoning in the description logic BEL

Abstract

Recently, Bayesian extensions of Description Logics, and in particular the logic BEL, were introduced as a means of representing certain knowledge that depends on an uncertain context. In this paper we introduce a novel structure, called proof structure, that encodes the contextual information required to deduce subsumption relations from a BEL knowledge base. Using this structure, we show that probabilistic reasoning in BEL can be reduced in polynomial time to standard Bayesian network inferences, thus obtaining tight complexity bounds for reasoning in BEL.