James P. Delgrande

James P. Delgrande, Birte Glimm, Thomas Meyer et al.

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade.

Zhiqiang Zhuang, James Delgrande, Abhaya Nayak et al.

Belief revision has been studied mainly with respect to background logics that are monotonic in character. In this paper we study belief revision when the underlying logic is non-monotonic instead--an inherently interesting problem that is under explored. In particular, we will focus on the revision of a body of beliefs that is represented as a logic program under the answer set semantics, while the new information is also similarly represented as a logic program. Our approach is driven by the observation that unlike in a monotonic setting where, when necessary, consistency in a revised body of beliefs is maintained by jettisoning some old beliefs, in a non-monotonic setting consistency can be restored by adding new beliefs as well. We will define a syntactic revision function and subsequently provide representation theorem for characterising it.

James P. Delgrande, Kewen Wang

In this paper we investigate forgetting in disjunctive logic programs, where forgetting an atom from a program amounts to a reduction in the signature of that program. The goal is to provide an approach that is syntax-independent, in that if two programs are strongly equivalent, then the results of forgetting an atom in each program should also be strongly equivalent. Our central definition of forgetting is impractical but satisfies this goal: Forgetting an atom is characterised by the set of SE consequences of the program that do not mention the atom to be forgotten. We then provide an equivalent, practical definition, wherein forgetting an atom $p$ is given by those rules in the program that don't mention $p$, together with rules obtained by a single inference step from rules that do mention $p$. Forgetting is shown to have appropriate properties; as well, the finite characterisation results in a modest (at worst quadratic) blowup. Finally we have also obtained a prototype implementation of this approach to forgetting.

Aaron Hunter, James P. Delgrande

In action domains where agents may have erroneous beliefs, reasoning about the effects of actions involves reasoning about belief change. In this paper, we use a transition system approach to reason about the evolution of an agents beliefs as actions are executed. Some actions cause an agent to perform belief revision while others cause an agent to perform belief update, but the interaction between revision and update can be non-elementary. We present a set of rationality properties describing the interaction between revision and update, and we introduce a new class of belief change operators for reasoning about alternating sequences of revisions and updates. Our belief change operators can be characterized in terms of a natural shifting operation on total pre-orderings over interpretations. We compare our approach with related work on iterated belief change due to action, and we conclude with some directions for future research.

James Delgrande, Yi Jin, Francis Jeffry Pelletier

In this paper we explore a class of belief update operators, in which the definition of the operator is compositional with respect to the sentence to be added. The goal is to provide an update operator that is intuitive, in that its definition is based on a recursive decomposition of the update sentences structure, and that may be reasonably implemented. In addressing update, we first provide a definition phrased in terms of the models of a knowledge base. While this operator satisfies a core group of the benchmark Katsuno-Mendelzon update postulates, not all of the postulates are satisfied. Other Katsuno-Mendelzon postulates can be obtained by suitably restricting the syntactic form of the sentence for update, as we show. In restricting the syntactic form of the sentence for update, we also obtain a hierarchy of update operators with Winsletts standard semantics as the most basic interesting approach captured. We subsequently give an algorithm which captures this approach; in the general case the algorithm is exponential, but with some not-unreasonable assumptions we obtain an algorithm that is linear in the size of the knowledge base. Hence the resulting approach has much better complexity characteristics than other operators in some situations. We also explore other compositional belief change operators: erasure is developed as a dual operator to update; we show that a forget operator is definable in terms of update; and we give a definition of the compositional revision operator. We obtain that compositional revision, under the most natural definition, yields the Satoh revision operator.