Francesco Poggi

Francesco Granata, Lorenzo Lamazzi, Misael Mongiovì et al.

We present RAGEAR (Retrieval-Augmented Graph-Enhanced Academic Recommender), a neurosymbolic recommender system for academic course recommendation. RAGEAR combines dense retrieval over full lecture transcripts with a symbolic Knowledge Graph modelling courses, lessons, transcript chunks, credits, study plans, and curricular information. The Knowledge Graph supports symbolic filtering and contextualisation based on structured constraints, such as credits, academic disciplines, study plans, and prerequisites. Unlike metadata-based approaches, it exploits fine-grained instructional content by retrieving transcript chunks semantically aligned with a student's query. The main contribution is a graph-aware aggregation function that propagates chunk-level evidence to course-level recommendations. The score combines three factors: the share of retrieved similarity associated with a course, the rank-based strength of its relevant chunks, and the distribution of evidence across lessons. We evaluate RAGEAR on 152 student-like queries through a human evaluation sample and a large-scale LLM-based relevance assessment. Results show that lecture transcripts improve over metadata-only retrieval, and that RAGEAR further improves ranking quality over a transcript-based normalized SumP baseline, especially for top-ranked recommendations.

Lorenzo Lamazzi, Aldo Gangemi, Alessio Giberti et al.

Tacit knowledge plays a central role in human expertise, yet it remains difficult to capture, formalize, and reuse in machine-interpretable form. This challenge is especially relevant in procedural domains, where successful execution depends not only on explicit instructions, but also on implicit assumptions, contextual constraints, embodied skills, and experience-based judgments rarely documented. As a result, current knowledge engineering pipelines struggle to transform tacit and process-centric knowledge into formally specified, machine-interpretable representations that can be queried, validated, reasoned over, and reused. In this paper, we introduce a neuro-symbolic framework that combines Logic-Augmented Generation and an Active-Inference-inspired approach for ontology-grounded Knowledge Graph construction. We evaluate the approach in a knowledge transfer case study in manufacturing, using assembly-like repair procedures from instructional videos as a reproducible proxy domain. Results show that the proposed solution improves completeness and semantic quality, advancing neuro-symbolic knowledge engineering for industrial domains.

Francesco Granata, Francesco Poggi, Misael Mongiovì

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures are gaining significant attention for their ability to ground language generation in reliable knowledge sources. Despite their impressive effectiveness in many areas, RAG systems based solely on semantic similarity often fail to ensure factual accuracy in specialized domains, where terminological ambiguity can affect retrieval relevance. This study proposes an enhanced RAG architecture that integrates a factual signal derived from Entity Linking to improve the accuracy of educational question-answering systems in Italian. The system includes a Wikidata-based Entity Linking module and implements three re-ranking strategies to combine semantic and entity-based information: a hybrid score weighting model, reciprocal rank fusion, and a cross-encoder re-ranker. Experiments were conducted on two benchmarks: a custom academic dataset and the standard SQuAD-it dataset. Results show that, in domain-specific contexts, the hybrid schema based on reciprocal rank fusion significantly outperforms both the baseline and the cross-encoder approach, while the cross-encoder achieves the best results on the general-domain dataset. These findings confirm the presence of an effect of domain mismatch and highlight the importance of domain adaptation and hybrid ranking strategies to enhance factual precision and reliability in retrieval-augmented generation. They also demonstrate the potential of entity-aware RAG systems in educational environments, fostering adaptive and reliable AI-based tutoring tools.

Sara Zuppiroli, Carmelo Fabio Longo, Anna Sofia Lippolis et al.

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is a cornerstone for representing rational agency in artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. Yet, its integration into structured, semantically interoperable knowledge representations remains limited. This paper presents a formal BDI Ontology, conceived as a modular Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) that captures the cognitive architecture of agents through beliefs, desires, intentions, and their dynamic interrelations. The ontology ensures semantic precision and reusability by aligning with foundational ontologies and best practices in modular design. Two complementary lines of experimentation demonstrate its applicability: (i) coupling the ontology with Large Language Models (LLMs) via Logic Augmented Generation (LAG) to assess the contribution of ontological grounding to inferential coherence and consistency; and (ii) integrating the ontology within the Semas reasoning platform, which implements the Triples-to-Beliefs-to-Triples (T2B2T) paradigm, enabling a bidirectional flow between RDF triples and agent mental states. Together, these experiments illustrate how the BDI Ontology acts as both a conceptual and operational bridge between declarative and procedural intelligence, paving the way for cognitively grounded, explainable, and semantically interoperable multi-agent and neuro-symbolic systems operating within the Web of Data.