After successful completion of the course, students are able to...
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The lecturer of this course will be Thomas Meyer / University of Cape Town.
Course description
Non-monotonic reasoning is an area of research in which various forms of defeasible inference are investigated. This course focuses on an elegant, comprehensive and well-studied framework for non-monotonic reasoning first proposed by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor in the early 1990s, and often referred to as the KLM approach to defeasible reasoning. The framework is worth studying for two reasons. Firstly, it provides for a thorough analy- sis of some formal properties that any consequence relation deemed as appropriate in a non-monotonic setting ought to satisfy. Such formal properties, which resemble those of a Gentzen-style proof system, play a central role in assessing how intuitive the obtained results are. Secondly, it allows for defeasible reasoning to be reduced to a serious of classical reasoning checks, sometimes without blowing up the computational complexity compared to the underlying classical case.
Tentative topics: i) A brief overview of the most important approaches to non-monotonic reasoning. ii) Defining propositional defeasible reasoning. iii) Propositional algorithms for defeasible reasoning. iv) A brief introduction to description logics. v) Lifting defeasible reasoning to description logics. vi) Algorithms and implementations of defeasible reasoning for description logics.
Recommended literature: A series of papers, ranging from the original 1990 KLM paper to recent work published in 2020, will be provided.
