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Towards a General Framework for Kinds of Forgetting in Common-Sense Belief Management

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Abstract

While humans have developed extremely effective ways of forgetting outdated or currently irrelevant information, freeing them to process ever-increasing amounts of information, there seems to be a gap between the technically defined notions of forgetting in knowledge representation and the common-sense understanding of forgetting. In order to bring different notions of forgetting closer together, we elaborate and identify kinds and contexts of forgetting from a common sense perspective. We present abstract formalizations of operations involving forgetting in a generic axiomatic style. We instantiate and refine this abstract framework with conditional beliefs and ordinal conditional functions as a high-level semantics. Using a general concept of change employing the principle of conditional preservation, we also introduce OCF-based realizations of forgetting operations inspired by cognitive psychology. Thereby, our work may be used to further develop a general view on forgetting in artificial intelligence and to initiate and enhance the interaction and exchange among research lines dealing with forgetting.

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Notes

  1. A different view on focussing is proposed in [13], where generic and evidential knowledge are distinguished.

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Acknowledgements

The research reported here was carried out in the FADE project and was supported by the German Research Society (DFG) within the Priority Research Program Intentional Forgetting in Organisations (DFG-SPP 1921; grants BE 1700/9-1, KE 1413/10-1, RA 1934/5-1). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and valuable comments that helped us to improve the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FernUniversität in Hagen, 58084, Hagen, Germany

    Christoph Beierle & Kai Sauerwald

  2. Technical University Dortmund, 44227, Dortmund, Germany

    Gabriele Kern-Isberner & Tanja Bock

  3. University of Freiburg, 79110, Freiburg, Germany

    Marco Ragni

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  1. Christoph Beierle
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  2. Gabriele Kern-Isberner
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  3. Kai Sauerwald
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  4. Tanja Bock
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  5. Marco Ragni
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Correspondence to Christoph Beierle.

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Beierle, C., Kern-Isberner, G., Sauerwald, K. et al. Towards a General Framework for Kinds of Forgetting in Common-Sense Belief Management. Künstl Intell 33, 57–68 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-018-0567-3

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