Public defence of Tjeerd Fokkens’ Licentiate thesis.

Opponent Dr Ing Stefan Borgwardt, Technische Universität Dresden
Examiner Professor Simon Dobnik, Göteborgs universitet

The problem of optimising automated explanations for entailments in knowledge bases is tackled by modelling deductive reasoning processes using the cognitive architecture ACT-R. This results in the model SHARP which simulates the algorithm for deciding inconsistency of an ABox in the description logic ALE as executed by a human. More precisely, SHARP enables predicting the inference time of this task, which is assumed to reflect cognitive load of a human agent. With the inference time, two complexity measures on ABoxes are defined that should correlate with cognitive load by design.

A copy of Tjeerd’s thesis can be obtained by sending an email to the contact person Fredrik Engström.