Probabilistic Default Reasoning with Conditional Constraints

We propose a combination of probabilistic reasoning from conditional constraints with approaches to default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. In detail, we generalize the notions of Pearl's entailment in system Z, Lehmann's lexicographic entailment, and Geffner's conditional entailment to conditional constraints. We give some examples that show that the new notions of z-, lexicographic, and conditional entailment have similar properties like their classical counterparts. Moreover, we show that the new notions of z-, lexicographic, and conditional entailment are proper generalizations of both their classical counterparts and the classical notion of logical entailment for conditional constraints.Comment: 8 pages; to appear in Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Special Session on Uncertainty Frameworks in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Breckenridge, Colorado, USA, 9-11 April 200

Logical preference representation and combinatorial vote,

We introduce the notion of combinatorial vote, where a group of agents (or voters) is supposed to express preferences and come to a common decision concerning a set of nonindependent variables to assign. We study two key issues pertaining to combinatorial vote, namely preference representation and the automated choice of an optimal decision. For each of these issues, we briefly review the state of the art, we try to define the main problems to be solved and identify their computational complexity

Complexity Results for Default Reasoning from Conditional Knowledge Bases

Conditional knowledge bases have been proposed as belief bases that include defeasible rules (also called defaults) of the form " ! ", which informally read as "generally, if then ." Such rules may have exceptions, which can be handled in different ways. A number of entailment semantics for conditional knowledge bases have been proposed in the literature. However, while the semantic properties and interrelationships of these formalisms are quite well understood, about their algorithmic properties only partial results are known so far. In this paper, we fill these gaps and draw a precise picture of the complexity of default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases: Given a conditional knowledge base KB and a default ! , does KB entail ! ? We classify the complexity of this problem for a number of well-known approaches (including Goldszmidt et al.'s maximum entropy approach and Geffner's conditional entailment). We consider the general propositional case as we..