Shapley Value Computation in Ontology-Mediated Query Answering

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 (SVC$^{dr}$) 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 $\mathcal{ELHI}_\bot$ and a connected constant-free homomorphism-closed query q the corresponding SVC$^{dr}$ 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 SVC$^{dr}$ and probabilistic query evaluation and allow us to generalize existing results on probabilistic OMQA.