Naive ABox abduction in ALC using a DL tableau

Abstract

The formal definition of abduction asks what needs to be added to a knowledge base to enable an observation to be entailed by the knowledge base. An observation which is not entailed by the knowledge base will result in open branches in a complete semantic tableau for the entailment. The statements required to close these branches therefore represent a solution to the abductive problem. In this paper we describe how this idea can be implemented for ABox abduction in the description logic ALC. We analyse the limitations of our algorithm and propose refinements to improve the quality of results.