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Default reasoning and belief revision: A syntax-independent approach

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Abstract

As an important variant of Reiter’s default logic, Poole (1988) developed a nonmonotonic reasoning framework in the classical first-order language. Brewka and Nebel extended Poole’s approach in order to enable a representation of priorities between defaults. In this paper a general framework for default reasoning is presented, which can be viewed as a generalization of the three approaches above. It is proved that the syntax-independent default reasoning in this framework is identical to the general belief revision operation introduced by Zhanget al. (1997). This result provides a solution to the problem whether there is a correspondence between belief revision and default logic for the infinite case. As a by-product, an answer to the question, raised by Mankinson and Gärdenfors (1991), is also given about whether there is a counterpart contraction in nonmonotonic logic.

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Correspondence to Zhang Dongmo.

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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 69785004) and the Science and Technology Funding for the Youth of Jiangsu Province.

ZHANG Dongmo received a Diploma in mathematics from Nanjing Normal University in 1980, the M.S. degree in computer application and the Ph.D. degree in intelligent system and robot from Najing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He worked as a post-doctor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University from Sep. 1996 to Aug. 1998. Now he is an associate professor of NUAA and also a research associate at School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include nonmonotonic reasoning, belief revision and reasoning about actions.

ZHU Zhaohui received his Bachelor and M.S. degrees in computer science and Ph.D. degree in control theory from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) in 1992, 1995 and 1998, respectively. Now he is working as a post-doctor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University from 1998 to this day. His research interests include nonmonotonic reasoning, reasoning about action and agent theory.

CHEN Shifu received a Diploma in mathematics from Nanjing University in 1958. Now he is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University. His research interests include reasoning based case and expert system.

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Zhang, D., Zhu, Z. & Chen, S. Default reasoning and belief revision: A syntax-independent approach. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 15, 430–438 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02950406

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02950406

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