From \ Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning : Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference " Learning the Classic Description Logic : Theoretical and Experimental

We present a series of theoretical and experimental results on the learnability of description logics. We rst extend previous formal learnability results on simple description logics to C-Classic, a description logic expressive enough to be practically useful. We then experimentally evaluate two extensions of a learning algorithm suggested by the formal analysis. The rst extension learns C-Classic descriptions from individuals. (The formal results assume that examples are themselves descriptions.) The second extension learns disjunctions of C-Classic descriptions from individuals. The experiments , which were conducted using several hundred target concepts from a number of domains, indicate that both extensions reliably learn complex natural concepts.