DL 2014
27th International Workshop on Description Logics
17 - 20 July 2014, Vienna
Abstract: This talk will discuss a very general notion of query
reformulation:
Given a query Q, a set of constraints Sigma, a target query language or programming language, and a cost metric, determine if there is an object in the target
language that is equivalent to Q relative to the constraints,
and if so find such an object optimizing the cost metric.
The problem has a long history in the database community, originally motivated by querying over materialized views. This talk will go over several very-recent developments—from a database perspective, but mentioning the relationship to description logics.
We will first go over the connection between reformulation and interpolation/preservation properties, originating in the work of Nash, Segoufin, and Vianu, and show how this can be extended to give a very elegant theoretical framework for studying the reformulation problem. After that we will turn to performing interpolation and reformulation directly over a physical plan language, rather than a query language. This will include a discussion of:
Bio: Michael Benedikt is a professor at Oxford University's computer science department, and a fellow of University College Oxford. He came to Oxford after a decade in US industrial research laboratories, including a position as Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. He has worked extensively in mathematical logic, finite model theory, verification, database theory, and database systems, and has served as chair of the ACM's main database theory conference, Principles of Database Systems. The current focus of his research is Web data management, with recent projects including querying of the deep Web, querying and integration of annotated data, and querying of web services.
Abstract:
Amsterdam-style logicians view modal logic as a fragment of classical
logic, and description logicians view their own formalisms in much the same way. Moreover, first-order logic itself can be viewed as a modest fragment of the higher-order logics of Frege and Russell, a fragment with useful model-theoretic properties. All in all, the fine structure of logic is a key topic in contemporary research, as the intensive study of (say) the 2-variable and various guarded fragments attest.
In this talk I want to consider the role of logical fragments in applications. I will focus on applications in natural language, as this is an area rich in non-monotonic and defeasible inference. Moreover, as my perspective is that of computational (rather than theoretical) linguistics, I am interested in efficient solutions to computational tasks - that is, in fragments of computation. Drawing on a running example involving applications of description logic and classical planning to a dialogue system, I will discuss the role of computation to provide 'pragmatic glue' that lets us work with small well-explored logical fragments, while simultaneously providing the dynamics required to model various forms of non-monotonicity
Bio: Patrick Blackburn received his BA from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in 1981; his MSc from the University of Sussex, England, in 1986; and his PhD from University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1990. He held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Information Technology at the Universities of Edinburgh and Amsterdam until 1992, and then worked until 1994 as a research associate at the Philosophy Department of the University of Utrecht on the project "Structural and Semantic Parallels between Natural Language and Programming Languages". He then moved to the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of the Saarland, Germany, and gained Habilitation in January 2000. From 2000 till 2011 he was a Directeur de Recherche at INRIA in Nancy, France, and since August 2011 he has been Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is a coauthor of Modal Logic (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Representation and Inference for Natural Language (CSLI Press, 2005), and Learn Prolog Now! (College Publications, 2006), and an editor of the Handbook of Modal Logic (Elsevier, 2007). His main research interests are modal logic (particularly hybrid logic) and formal and computational approaches to natural language semantics and pragmatics.
Abstract: For the first time since the emergence of the Web, structured data is playing a key role in search engines and is therefore being collected via a concerted effort. Much of this data is being extracted from the Web, which contains vast quantities of structured data on a variety of domains, such as hobbies, products and reference data. Moreover, the Web provides a platform that encourages publishing more data sets from governments and other public organizations. The Web also supports new data management opportunities, such as effective crisis response, data journalism and crowd-sourcing data sets.
I will describe some of the efforts we are conducting at Google to collect structured data, filter the high-quality content, and serve it to our users. These efforts include providing Google Fusion Tables, a service for easily ingesting, visualizing and integrating data, mining the Web for high-quality HTML tables, and contributing these data assets to Google's other services. The talk will touch at various points on the role of ontologies in managing all this structured data and the new kind of ontological tools we may require.
Bio: Alon Halevy heads the Structured Data Management Research group at Google. Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he founded the database group. In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space, and in 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic, a company that created search engines for the deep web, and was acquired by Google. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000, and was a Sloan Fellow (1999-2000). He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993 and his Bachelors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Halevy is also a coffee culturalist and published the book "The Infinite Emotions of Coffee", published in 2011 and a co-author of the book "Principles of Data Integration", published in 2012.
