{"ID":2883612,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07742","arxiv_id":"2508.07742","title":"A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases","abstract":"Repair-based semantics have been extensively studied as a means of obtaining meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent knowledge bases (KBs). While several works have considered how to exploit a priority relation between facts to select optimal repairs, the question of how to specify such preferences remains largely unaddressed. This motivates us to introduce a declarative rule-based framework for specifying and computing a priority relation between conflicting facts. As the expressed preferences may contain undesirable cycles, we consider the problem of determining when a set of preference rules always yields an acyclic relation, and we also explore a pragmatic approach that extracts an acyclic relation by applying various cycle removal techniques. Towards an end-to-end system for querying inconsistent KBs, we present a preliminary implementation and experimental evaluation of the framework, which employs answer set programming to evaluate the preference rules, apply the desired cycle resolution techniques to obtain a priority relation, and answer queries under prioritized-repair semantics.","short_abstract":"Repair-based semantics have been extensively studied as a means of obtaining meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent knowledge bases (KBs). While several works have considered how to exploit a priority relation between facts to select optimal repairs, the question of how to specify such preferences remain...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07742","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07742v2","authors":"[\"Meghyn Bienvenu\",\"Camille Bourgaux\",\"Katsumi Inoue\",\"Robin Jean\"]","published":"2025-08-11T08:21:02Z","proceeding":"cs.LO","tasks":"[\"cs.LO\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.DB\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}