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Contextual Reasoning: Usually Birds Can Abductively Fly

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Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10377))

Abstract

We present a new logic programming approach to contextual reasoning, based on the Weak Completion Semantics (WCS), the latter of which has been successfully applied in the past to adequately model various human reasoning tasks. One of the properties of WCS is the open world assumption with respect to undefined atoms. This is a characteristic that is different to other common Logic Programming semantics, a property that seems suitable when modeling human reasoning. Notwithstanding, we have noticed that the famous Tweety default reasoning example, originally introduced by Reiter, cannot be modeled straightforwardly under WCS. Hence, to address the issue and taking Pereira and Pinto’s inspection points as inspiration, we develop a notion of contextual reasoning for which we introduce contextual logic programs. We reconsider the formal properties of WCS with respect to these and verify whether they still hold. Finally, we set forth contextual abduction and show that not only the original Tweety example can be nicely modeled within the new approach, but more sophisticated examples as well, where context plays an important role.

L.M. Pereira—The authors are mentioned in alphabetical order.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If those atoms were assumed to be false, then typical human reasoning tasks like the suppression task [2] could not be modeled adequately [7].

  2. 2.

    Currently, we know of at least 40 species of birds that can’t fly.

  3. 3.

    Defeaters were not part of the first specification of the set of abducibles under WCS [7, 15], but without the defeaters the first example discussed in this section cannot be solved.

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Acknowledgements

LMP acknowledges support from FCT/MEC NOVA LINCS Pest UID/CEC/04516/2013. Many thanks to Tobias Philipp and Christoph Wernhard.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Center for Computational Logic, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Emmanuelle-Anna Dietz Saldanha & Steffen Hölldobler

  2. North-Caucasus Federal University, Stavropol, Russian Federation

    Steffen Hölldobler

  3. NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics, Departamento de Informática Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516, Caparica, Portugal

    Luís Moniz Pereira

Authors
  1. Emmanuelle-Anna Dietz Saldanha
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  2. Steffen Hölldobler
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  3. Luís Moniz Pereira
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Correspondence to Emmanuelle-Anna Dietz Saldanha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Marcello Balduccini

  2. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Tomi Janhunen

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Dietz Saldanha, EA., Hölldobler, S., Pereira, L.M. (2017). Contextual Reasoning: Usually Birds Can Abductively Fly. In: Balduccini, M., Janhunen, T. (eds) Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10377. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61660-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61660-5_8

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