Signature Entrenchment and Conceptual Changes in Automated Theory Repair
This work addresses the challenge of making AI agents' conceptual knowledge more adaptable and plausible, though it is incremental as it builds on existing automated theory repair systems.
The paper tackles the problem of automated theory repair for conceptual changes in AI agents by introducing a method to evaluate signature entrenchment in Datalog theories, which measures the inferential contributions of logical elements to guide repairs toward succinct and intuitive outcomes.
Human beliefs change, but so do the concepts that underpin them. The recent Abduction, Belief Revision and Conceptual Change (ABC) repair system combines several methods from automated theory repair to expand, contract, or reform logical structures representing conceptual knowledge in artificial agents. In this paper we focus on conceptual change: repair not only of the membership of logical concepts, such as what animals can fly, but also concepts themselves, such that birds may be divided into flightless and flying birds, by changing the signature of the logical theory used to represent them. We offer a method for automatically evaluating entrenchment in the signature of a Datalog theory, in order to constrain automated theory repair to succinct and intuitive outcomes. Formally, signature entrenchment measures the inferential contributions of every logical language element used to express conceptual knowledge, i.e., predicates and the arguments, ranking possible repairs to retain valuable logical concepts and reject redundant or implausible alternatives. This quantitative measurement of signature entrenchment offers a guide to the plausibility of conceptual changes, which we aim to contrast with human judgements of concept entrenchment in future work.