Concept learning for ℰℒ ⁺⁺ by refinement and reinforcement

Ontology construction in OWL is an important and yet time-consuming task even for knowledge engineers and thus a (semi-) automatic approach will greatly assist in constructing ontologies. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learning concept definitions in from a collection of assertions. Our approach is based on both refinement operator in inductive logic programming and reinforcement learning algorithm. The use of reinforcement learning significantly reduces the search space of candidate concepts. Besides, we present an experimental evaluation of constructing a family ontology. The results show that our approach is competitive with an existing learning system for ℰℒ. © 2012 Springer-Verlag