Deriving conclusions from non-monotonic cause-effect relations
نویسنده
چکیده
We present an extension of Logic Programming (under stable models semantics) that, not only allows concluding whether a true atom is a cause of another atom, but also deriving new conclusions from these causal-effect relations. This is expressive enough to capture informal rules like “if some agent’s actions A have been necessary to cause an event E then conclude atom caused(A, E),” something that, to the best of our knowledge, had not been formalised in the literature. To this aim, we start from a first attempt that proposed extending the syntax of logic programs with so-called causal literals. These causal literals are expressions that can be used in rule bodies and allow inspecting the derivation of some atom A in the program with respect to some query function ψ. Depending on how these query functions are defined, we can model different types of causal relations such as sufficient, necessary or contributory causes, for instance. The initial approach was specifically focused on monotonic query functions. This was enough to cover sufficient cause-effect relations but, unfortunately, necessary and contributory are essentially non-monotonic. In this work, we define a semantics for non-monotonic causal literals showing that, not only extends the stable model semantics for normal logic programs, but also preserves many of its usual desirable properties for the extended syntax. Using this new semantics, we provide precise definitions of necessary and contributory causal relations and briefly explain their behaviour on a pair of typical examples from the Knowledge Representation literature. (Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming)
منابع مشابه
Distance-based paraconsistent logics
We introduce a general framework that is based on distance semantics and investigate the main properties of the entailment relations that it induces. It is shown that such entailments are particularly useful for non-monotonic reasoning and for drawing rational conclusions from incomplete and inconsistent information. Some applications are considered in the context of belief revision, informatio...
متن کاملA Logic For Causal Reasoning
We introduce a logical formalism of irreflexivc causal production relations that possesses both a standard monotonic semantics, and a natural nonmonotonic semantics. The formalism is shown to provide a complete characterization for the causal reasoning behind causal theories from [McCain and Turner, 1997]. It is shown also that any causal relation is reducible to its Horn sub-relation with resp...
متن کاملOn the Non-monotonic Behaviour of Event Calculus for Deriving Maximal Time Intervals
The Event Calculus was proposed by Kowalski and Sergot as a simple and effective tool for dealing with time and actions in the framework of logic programming [9]. In response to the occurrences of events, the formalism computes maximal and convex intervals of validity of the relationships holding in the modeled world. The case of interest is when the set of events is fixed, but the order of the...
متن کاملMost associations between transcript features and gene expression are monotonic.
Dozens of previous studies in the field have dealt with the relations between transcript features and their expression. Indeed, understanding the way gene expression is encoded in transcripts should not only contribute to disciplines, such as functional genomics and molecular evolution, but also to biotechnology and human health. Previous studies in the field mainly aimed at predicting protein ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- TPLP
دوره 16 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2016