Constraint Acquisition via Partial Queries / 475
Christian Bessiere, Remi Coletta, Emmanuel Hebrard, George Katsirelos, Nadjib Lazaar, Nina Narodytska, Claude-Guy Quimper, Toby Walsh

We learn constraint networks by asking the user partial queries. That is, we ask the user to classify assignments to subsets of the variables as positive or negative. We provide an algorithm that, given a negative example, focuses onto a constraint of the target network in a number of queries logarithmic in the size of the example. We give information theoretic lower bounds for learning some simple classes of constraint networks and show that our generic algorithm is optimal in some cases. Finally we evaluate our algorithm on some benchmarks.