Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Resource-Bounded Belief Revision and Contraction

  • Conference paper
Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies III (DALT 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3904))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Agents need to be able to change their beliefs; in particular, they should be able to contract or remove a certain belief in order to restore consistency to their set of beliefs, and revise their beliefs by incorporating a new belief which may be inconsistent with their previous beliefs. An influential theory of belief change proposed by Alchourron, Gärdenfors and Makinson (AGM) [1] describes postulates which rational belief revision and contraction operations should satisfy. The AGM postulates are usually taken as characterising idealised rational reasoners, and the corresponding belief change operations are considered unsuitable for implementable agents due to their high computational cost [2]. The main result of this paper is to show that an efficient (linear time) belief contraction operation nevertheless satisfies all but one of the AGM postulates for contraction. This contraction operation is defined for an implementable rule-based agent which can be seen as a reasoner in a very weak logic; although the agent’s beliefs are deductively closed with respect to this logic, checking consistency and tracing dependencies between beliefs is not computationally expensive. Finally, we give a non-standard definition of belief revision in terms of contraction for our agent.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Alchourrón, C.E., Gärdenfors, P., Makinson, D.: On the logic of theory change: Partial meet functions for contraction and revision. Journal of Symbolic Logic 50, 510–530 (1985)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Doyle, J.: Reason maintenance and belief revision. Foundations vs coherence theories. In Gärdenfors, P., ed.: Belief Revision. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 29, pp. 29–51. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Doyle, J.: Truth maintenance systems for problem solving. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 1977, p. 247 (1977)

    Google Scholar 

  4. McAllester, D.A.: Truth maintenance. In: Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1990), pp. 1109–1116. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Gärdenfors, P.: Conditionals and changes of belief. In: Niiniluoto, I., Tuomela, R. (eds.) The Logic and Epistemology of Scientific Change, pp. 381–404. North-Holland, Amsterdam (1978)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gärdenfors, P.: Knowledge in Flux: Modelling the Dynamics of Epistemic States. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1988)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Rao, A.S.: AgentSpeak(L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language. In: Perram, J., Van de Velde, W. (eds.) MAAMAW 1996. LNCS, vol. 1038, pp. 42–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Laird, J.E., Newell, A., Rosenbloom, P.S.: SOAR: An architecture for general intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 33, 1–64 (1987)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Software Technology Branch, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center Houston: CLIPS Reference Manual: Version 6.21 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Makinson, D.: On the status of the postulate of recovery in the logic of theory change. Journal of Philosophical Logic 16, 383–394 (1987)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Williams, M.A.: Iterated theory base change: A computational model. In: Proceedings of Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1995), pp. 1541–1549. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Galliers, J.R.: Autonomous belief revision and communication. In: Gärdenfors, P. (ed.) Belief Revision. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 29, pp. 220–246. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Bezzazi, H., Janot, S., Konieczny, S., Pérez, R.P.: Analysing rational properties of change operators based on forward chaining. In: Kifer, M., Voronkov, A., Freitag, B., Decker, H. (eds.) Dagstuhl Seminar 1997, DYNAMICS 1997, and ILPS-WS 1997. LNCS, vol. 1472, pp. 317–339. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Makinson, D.: How to give it up: A survey of some formal aspects of the logic of theory change. Synthese 62, 347–363 (1985)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Nebel, B.: A knowledge level analysis of belief revision. In: Brachman, R., Levesque, H.J., Reiter, R. (eds.) Proceedings of the First International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pp. 301–311. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Williams, M.A.: Two operators for theory base change. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 259–265. World Scientific, Singapore (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Rott, H.: Just Because Taking belief bases seriously. In: Buss, S.R., Hájaek, P., Pudlák, P. (eds.) Logic Colloquium 1998—Proceedings of the 1998 ASL European Summer Meeting. Lecture Notes in Logic, Association for Symbolic Logic, vol. 13, pp. 387–408 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nebel, B.: Base revision operations and schemes: Representation, semantics and complexity. In: Cohn, A.G. (ed.) Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 1994), pp. 341–345. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Nebel, B.: Syntax-based approaches to belief revision. In: Gärdenfors, P. (ed.) Belief Revision. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 29, pp. 52–88. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Dixon, S.: A finite base belief revision system. In: Proceedings of Sixteenth Australian Computer Science Conference (ACSC-16): Australian Computer Science Communications, Brisbane, Australia, vol. 15, pp. 445–451. Queensland University of Technology, Australia (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Dixon, S., Wobcke, W.: The implementation of a first-order logic AGM belief revision system. In: Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Tools with AI, Boston, MA, pp. 40–47. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Wasserman, R.: Resource-Bounded Belief Revision. PhD thesis, ILLC, University of Amsterdam (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Chopra, S., Parikh, R., Wassermann, R.: Approximate belief revision. Logic Journal of the IGPL 9, 755–768 (2001)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Natasha Alechina, Mark Jago & Brian Logan

Authors
  1. Natasha Alechina
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mark Jago
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Brian Logan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, UniversitĂ  di Torino, Via Pessinetto 12, 10149, Turin, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. Artificial Intelligence Programme, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ulle Endriss

  3. Alma Mater Studiorum UniversitĂ  di Bologna a Cesena, via Venezia 52, 47023, Cesena, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  4. DEIS, University of Bologna, V.le Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Torroni

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Alechina, N., Jago, M., Logan, B. (2006). Resource-Bounded Belief Revision and Contraction. In: Baldoni, M., Endriss, U., Omicini, A., Torroni, P. (eds) Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies III. DALT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11691792_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11691792_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33106-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33107-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation