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arXiv · 2508.07742

A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases

Meghyn Bienvenu·Camille Bourgaux·Katsumi Inoue·Robin Jean
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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.

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Meghyn Bienvenu, Camille Bourgaux, Katsumi Inoue, Robin Jean. 2026-08-03. A Rule-Based Approach to Specifying Preferences over Conflicting Facts and Querying Inconsistent Knowledge Bases. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07742

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