English

DELE: Deductive $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ Embeddings for Knowledge Base Completion

Artificial Intelligence 2026-02-24 v3

Abstract

Ontology embeddings map classes, roles, and individuals in ontologies into Rn\mathbb{R}^n, and within Rn\mathbb{R}^n similarity between entities can be computed or new axioms inferred. For ontologies in the Description Logic EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++}, several optimization-based embedding methods have been developed that explicitly generate models of an ontology. However, these methods suffer from some limitations; they do not distinguish between statements that are unprovable and provably false, and therefore they may use entailed statements as negatives. Furthermore, they do not utilize the deductive closure of an ontology to identify statements that are inferred but not asserted. We evaluated a set of embedding methods for EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++} ontologies, incorporating several modifications that aim to make use of the ontology deductive closure. In particular, we designed novel negative losses that account both for the deductive closure and different types of negatives and formulated evaluation methods for knowledge base completion. We demonstrate that our embedding methods improve over the baseline ontology embedding in the task of knowledge base or ontology completion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.01574,
  title  = {DELE: Deductive $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ Embeddings for Knowledge Base Completion},
  author = {Olga Mashkova and Fernando Zhapa-Camacho and Robert Hoehndorf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.01574},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Extended version of the paper "Enhancing Geometric Ontology Embeddings for $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ with Negative Sampling and Deductive Closure Filtering" presented at NeSy 2024 conference, revised version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:46:29.868Z