120 research outputs found
Complexity of Nested Circumscription and Nested Abnormality Theories
The need for a circumscriptive formalism that allows for simple yet elegant
modular problem representation has led Lifschitz (AIJ, 1995) to introduce
nested abnormality theories (NATs) as a tool for modular knowledge
representation, tailored for applying circumscription to minimize exceptional
circumstances. Abstracting from this particular objective, we propose L_{CIRC},
which is an extension of generic propositional circumscription by allowing
propositional combinations and nesting of circumscriptive theories. As shown,
NATs are naturally embedded into this language, and are in fact of equal
expressive capability. We then analyze the complexity of L_{CIRC} and NATs, and
in particular the effect of nesting. The latter is found to be a source of
complexity, which climbs the Polynomial Hierarchy as the nesting depth
increases and reaches PSPACE-completeness in the general case. We also identify
meaningful syntactic fragments of NATs which have lower complexity. In
particular, we show that the generalization of Horn circumscription in the NAT
framework remains CONP-complete, and that Horn NATs without fixed letters can
be efficiently transformed into an equivalent Horn CNF, which implies
polynomial solvability of principal reasoning tasks. Finally, we also study
extensions of NATs and briefly address the complexity in the first-order case.
Our results give insight into the ``cost'' of using L_{CIRC} (resp. NATs) as a
host language for expressing other formalisms such as action theories,
narratives, or spatial theories.Comment: A preliminary abstract of this paper appeared in Proc. Seventeenth
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), pages
169--174. Morgan Kaufmann, 200
Expert vs. Management Support Systems: Semantic Issues
Expert systems hold great promise for technical application areas such as medical diagnosis or engineering design. They are, we argue, less promising for management applications. The reason is that managers are not experts in the sense of possessing a formal body of knowledge which they apply. The limitations of artificial intelligence approaches in managerial domains is explained in terms of semantic change, motivating attention towards management (decision) support systems
Schemas for Unordered XML on a DIME
We investigate schema languages for unordered XML having no relative order
among siblings. First, we propose unordered regular expressions (UREs),
essentially regular expressions with unordered concatenation instead of
standard concatenation, that define languages of unordered words to model the
allowed content of a node (i.e., collections of the labels of children).
However, unrestricted UREs are computationally too expensive as we show the
intractability of two fundamental decision problems for UREs: membership of an
unordered word to the language of a URE and containment of two UREs.
Consequently, we propose a practical and tractable restriction of UREs,
disjunctive interval multiplicity expressions (DIMEs).
Next, we employ DIMEs to define languages of unordered trees and propose two
schema languages: disjunctive interval multiplicity schema (DIMS), and its
restriction, disjunction-free interval multiplicity schema (IMS). We study the
complexity of the following static analysis problems: schema satisfiability,
membership of a tree to the language of a schema, schema containment, as well
as twig query satisfiability, implication, and containment in the presence of
schema. Finally, we study the expressive power of the proposed schema languages
and compare them with yardstick languages of unordered trees (FO, MSO, and
Presburger constraints) and DTDs under commutative closure. Our results show
that the proposed schema languages are capable of expressing many practical
languages of unordered trees and enjoy desirable computational properties.Comment: Theory of Computing System
Description Logic for Scene Understanding at the Example of Urban Road Intersections
Understanding a natural scene on the basis of external sensors is a task yet to be solved by computer algorithms. The present thesis investigates the suitability of a particular family of explicit, formal representation and reasoning formalisms for this task, which are subsumed under the term Description Logic
Heterogeneous Active Agents
Over the years, many different agent programming languages have been
proposed. In this paper, we propose a concept called Agent Programs
using which, the way an agent should act in various situations can be
declaratively specified by the creator of that agent. Agent Programs
may be built on top of arbitrary pieces of software code and may be used
to specify what an agent is obliged to do, what an agent may do, and
what an agent may not do. In this paper, we define several successively
more sophisticated and epistemically satisfying declarative semantics
for agent programs, and study the computation price to be paid (in terms
of complexity) for such epistemic desiderata. We further show that
agent programs cleanly extend well understood semantics for logic
programs, and thus are clearly linked to existing results on logic
programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. Last, but not least, we have
built a simulation of a Supply Chain application in terms of our theory,
building on top of commercial software systems such as Microsoft Access
and ESRI's Map Object.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-15
Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs
Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas
28th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2021)
The 28th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2021) was planned to take place in Klagenfurt, Austria, but had to move to an online conference due to the insecurities and restrictions caused by the pandemic. Since its frst edition in 1994, TIME Symposium is quite unique in the panorama of the scientifc conferences as its main goal is to bring together researchers from distinct research areas involving the management and representation of temporal data as well as the reasoning about temporal aspects of information. Moreover, TIME Symposium aims to bridge theoretical and applied research, as well as to serve as an interdisciplinary forum for exchange among researchers from the areas of artifcial intelligence, database management, logic and verifcation, and beyond
Principles of Security and Trust: 7th International Conference, POST 2018, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2018, Thessaloniki, Greece, April 14-20, 2018, Proceedings
authentication; computer science; computer software selection and evaluation; cryptography; data privacy; formal logic; formal methods; formal specification; internet; privacy; program compilers; programming languages; security analysis; security systems; semantics; separation logic; software engineering; specifications; verification; world wide we
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