We’ll give you what you want - An Ontological Model of User Preferences 1

Oct 22, 2026

The notion of preferences is central in service robotics, where robot–human interaction quality depends on capturing what humans prefer in context. Existing formal accounts often omit a precise account of what options are and how option structure relates to the situations they generate. This work proposes a formal ontological model in which options are non-atomic entities defined through the complex situations they bring about, enabling preference-aware decision making.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

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Pages9

Reading Time23 min

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Introduction

Related Work

We’ll give you what you want: An Ontological Model of User Preferences 1 Mona ABDEL-KEREAM a , Daniel BESSLER a , Ayden JANSSENb , Sascha JONGEBLOED a , Robin NOLTE b , Mihai POMARLANb , and Robert PORZELb a University of Bremen, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Bremen, Germany b University of Bremen, Department of Linguistics, Bremen, Germany Abstract. The notion of preferences plays an important role in many disciplines including service robotics which is concerned with scenarios in which robots interact with humans. These interactions can be favored by robots taking human preferences into account. This raises the issue of how preferences should be represented to support such preference-aware decision making. Several formal accounts for a notion of preferences exist. However, these approaches fall short on defining the nature and structure of the options that a robot has in a given situation. In this work, we thus investigate a formal model of preferences where options are non-atomic entities that are defined by the complex situations they bring about. Keywords. Human-Robot Interaction, Formal Ontologies, User Preferences 1. Introduction Robots have yet to reach the level of cognitive capabilities required for use-cases in the service sector where they interact with humans, for example as shopkeepers, waiters or general assistants. Through these interactions a course of events ensue that can be more or less suitable to the wishes and intentions of the human. The robot may face different options that would each bring about a different situation where some individual outcome might be preferable over others from the perspective of the human. However, the actual preference of humans over different options in a given situation is highly contextdependent. A human might, for example, prefer cold over hot drinks on summer days, while preferring hot drinks like tea and coffee when eating a cake. The concept of preferences is relevant in many disciplines ranging from philosophy, economics and social science to robotics. A unified understanding of preferences 1The research reported in this paper has been supported by the German Research Foundation DFG, as part of Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 1320 Project-ID 329551904 “EASE-Everyday Activity Science and Engineering”, University of Bremen ([http://www.ease-crc.org/](http://www.ease-crc.org/)). The research was conducted in subprojects “P01 – Embodied semantics for the language of action and change: Combining analysis, reasoning and simulation”,“PO5-N – Principles of Metareasoning for Everyday Activities”,“INF – Research Data Management within EASE and Distribution of Open Research Data” and by the FET-Open Project \#951846 ”MUHAI – Meaning and Understanding for Human-centric AI” by the EU Pathfinder and Horizon 2020 Program, and by the trilateral Project \#442588247 ”ai4hri – artificial intelligence for humanrobot interaction” which is partly funded by the DFG. July 2023 across those disciplines has however yet to emerge. A significant step towards this goal by means of a logical language is the framework of preference logic [1] . It defines several fundamental characteristics such as asymmetry of preference, and allows to formulate statements that relate different options. However, the structure of options and their relations to the situations they bring about is widely unconsidered. In this work we, thus, seek to endow our cognitive robotic agents with the conceptual inventory needed to reason about the possible preferences of the involved human agents in the light of the resulting situation for a given action path. To this end, we introduce a formal model of preferences that is purposed as a means for reasoning and ultimately selecting a specific course of actions over alternative ones with respect to the given user preference at hand. The model is designed along a set of competency questions that each corresponds to a robot cap

FAQs

Why is representing preferences important in service robotics?

Robots interacting with humans need to account for human preferences to make interactions more suitable. Preference-aware decision making helps determine which option leads to better outcomes for the human.

What limitation do existing formal approaches to preferences have?

They often fall short in defining the nature and structure of the options available in a given situation, and how these options relate to the situations they bring about.

How does the proposed model characterize options?

Options are modeled as non-atomic entities defined by the complex situations they entail, rather than as simple atomic alternatives.

Oct 22, 2026

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