Belief Revision in Structured Probabilistic Argumentation
This work addresses knowledge base maintenance in domains with uncertain and conflicting information, though it appears incremental as it extends existing logic programming with probabilistic models and adapts classical belief revision concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of handling contradictory and uncertain data in knowledge bases by proposing a probabilistic structured argumentation framework based on Presumptive Defeasible Logic Programming (PreDeLP). It introduces non-prioritized belief revision operations for this framework, establishing rationality postulates and proving a representation theorem linking operators to these postulates.
In real-world applications, knowledge bases consisting of all the information at hand for a specific domain, along with the current state of affairs, are bound to contain contradictory data coming from different sources, as well as data with varying degrees of uncertainty attached. Likewise, an important aspect of the effort associated with maintaining knowledge bases is deciding what information is no longer useful; pieces of information (such as intelligence reports) may be outdated, may come from sources that have recently been discovered to be of low quality, or abundant evidence may be available that contradicts them. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic structured argumentation framework that arises from the extension of Presumptive Defeasible Logic Programming (PreDeLP) with probabilistic models, and argue that this formalism is capable of addressing the basic issues of handling contradictory and uncertain data. Then, to address the last issue, we focus on the study of non-prioritized belief revision operations over probabilistic PreDeLP programs. We propose a set of rationality postulates -- based on well-known ones developed for classical knowledge bases -- that characterize how such operations should behave, and study a class of operators along with theoretical relationships with the proposed postulates, including a representation theorem stating the equivalence between this class and the class of operators characterized by the postulates.