A tool for reasoning about qualitative temporal information: the theory of S-languages with a Lisp implementation

http://www.jucs.org/jucs_14_20/a_tool_for_reasoningInternational audienceReasoning about incomplete qualitative temporal information is an essential topic in many artificial intelligence and natural language processing applications. In the domain of natural language processing for instance, the temporal analysis of a text %provides yields a set of temporal relations between events in a given linguistic theory. The problem is first to express events and any possible temporal relations between them, then to express the qualitative temporal constraints (as subsets of the set of all possible temporal relations) and compute (or count) all possible temporal relations that can be deduced. For this purpose, we propose to use the formalism of S-languages, based on the mathematical notion of S-arrangements with repetitions [schwer:CRM02]. In this paper, we present this formalism in detail and our implementation of it. We explain why Lisp is adequate to implement this theory. Next we describe a Common Lisp system \SLS\ (for S-LanguageS) which implements part of this formalism. A graphical interface written using McCLIM, the free implementation of the CLIM specification, frees the potential user of any Lisp knowledge. Fully developed examples illustrate both the theory and the implementation

Temporal Reasoning without Transitive Tables

rapport interneRepresenting and reasoning about qualitative temporal information is an essential part of many artificial intelligence tasks. Lots of models have been proposed in the litterature for representing such temporal information. All derive from a point-based or an interval-based framework. One fundamental reasoning task that arises in applications of these frameworks is given by the following scheme: given possibly indefinite and incomplete knowledge of the binary relationships between some temporal objects, find the consistent scenarii between all these objects. All these models require transitive tables --- or similarly inference rules--- for solving such tasks. We have defined an alternative model, S-languages - to represent qualitative temporal information, based on the only two relations of \emph{precedence} and \emph{simultaneity}. In this paper, we show how this model enables to avoid transitive tables or inference rules to handle this kind of problem

A Complete Classification of Tractability in RCC-5

We investigate the computational properties of the spatial algebra RCC-5 which is a restricted version of the RCC framework for spatial reasoning. The satisfiability problem for RCC-5 is known to be NP-complete but not much is known about its approximately four billion subclasses. We provide a complete classification of satisfiability for all these subclasses into polynomial and NP-complete respectively. In the process, we identify all maximal tractable subalgebras which are four in total.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files accompanying this articl

From local to global consistency in temporal constraint networks

AbstractWe study the problem of global consistency for several classes of quantitative temporal constraints which include inequalities, inequations and disjunctions of inequations. In all cases that we consider we identify the level of local consistency that is necessary and sufficient for achieving global consistency and present an algorithm which achieves this level. As a byproduct of our analysis, we also develop an interesting minimal network algorithm