Time-Bounded Query Generator For Constraint Acquisition

QuAcQ is a constraint acquisition algorithm that assists a non-expert user to model her problem as a constraint network. QuAcQ generates queries as examples to be classified as positive or negative. One of the drawbacks of QuAcQ is that generating queries can be time-consuming. In this paper we present TQ-GEN, a time-bounded query generator. TQ-GEN is able to generate a query in a bounded amount of time. We rewrite QuAcQ to incorporate the TQ-GEN generator. This leads to a new algorithm called T-QUACQ. We propose several strategies to make T-QUACQ efficient. Our experimental analysis shows that thanks to the use of TQ-GEN, T-QUACQ dramatically improves the basic QuAcQ in terms of time consumption, and sometimes also in terms of number of queries.