Fast Approximate A-Box Consistency Checking Using Machine Learning

Ontology reasoning is typically a computationally intensive operation. While soundness and completeness of results is required in some use cases, for many others, a sensible trade-off between computation efforts and correctness of results makes more sense. In this paper, we show that it is possible to approximate a central task in reasoning, i.e., A-box consistency checking, by training a machine learning model which approximates the behavior of that reasoner for a specific ontology. On four different datasets, we show that such learned models constantly achieve an accuracy above 95i¾ź% at less than 2i¾ź% of the runtime of a reasoner, using a decision tree with no more than 20 inner nodes. For example, this allows for validating 293M Microdata documents against the schema.org ontology in less than 90i¾źmin, compared to 18 days required by a state of the art ontology reasoner.