Making Sense of a Sequence of Events: A Psychologically Supported AI Implementation

International audiencePeople try to make sense of the usually incomplete reports they receive about events that take place. For doing this, they make use of what they believe the normal course of thing should be. An agent's beliefs may be consonant or dissonant with what is reported. For making sense people usually ascribe different types of relations between events. A prototypical example is the ascription of causality between events. The paper proposes a systematic study of consonance and dissonance between beliefs and reports. The approach is shown to be consistent with findings in psychology. An implementation is presented with some illustrative examples