English

Shapley Value Computation in Ontology-Mediated Query Answering

Artificial Intelligence 2026-02-26 v3 Databases

Abstract

The Shapley value was originally introduced in cooperative game theory as a wealth distribution mechanism. It has since found use in knowledge representation and databases for the purpose of assigning scores to formulas and database tuples based upon their contribution to obtaining a query result or inconsistency. The application of the Shapley value outside of its original setting relies upon defining a numeric wealth function that captures the phenomenon of interest. In the case of database queries, recent work has focused on the so-called drastic Shapley value, obtained by translating a Boolean query into a 0/1 function based upon whether the query is satisfied or not. The present paper explores the use of the drastic Shapley value in the context of ontology-mediated query answering (OMQA). We present a detailed complexity analysis of the drastic Shapley value computation (SVCdr^{dr}) problem in the OMQA setting. In particular, we establish a dichotomy result that shows that for every ontology-mediated query (T,q) composed of an ontology T formulated in the description logic ELHI\mathcal{ELHI}_\bot and a connected constant-free homomorphism-closed query q the corresponding SVCdr^{dr} problem is either tractable (in FP) or #P-hard. We further show how the #P-hardness side of the dichotomy can be strengthened to cover possibly disconnected queries with constants. Our results exploit recently discovered connections between SVCdr^{dr} and probabilistic query evaluation and allow us to generalize existing results on probabilistic OMQA.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.20058,
  title  = {Shapley Value Computation in Ontology-Mediated Query Answering},
  author = {Meghyn Bienvenu and Diego Figueira and Pierre Lafourcade},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.20058},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Extended version of KR 2024 homonymous paper

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:56:59.910Z