Abstract:

Abduction is an important form of nonmonotonic reasoning. The concept was introduced in the late 19th century by the American philosopher Charles Sander Peirce (1995) as an inference scheme aimed at deriving potential explanations for observations. A general feature of abductive reasoning is the existence of multiple abductive explanations, which are typically not equally compelling. Therefore, identifying a subclass, possibly narrow, of "preferred ex-planations" is an important problem.

In this talk, we present a new measure of the quality of an explanation in terms of its arbitrariness and propose to consider as "preferred" only those explanations that minimize arbitrariness. This approach can be applied with any of the standard semantics for logic programs.

About:

Luciano Caroprese received the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Calabria in 2008. He is Research Associate at the Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering of University of Calabria. His area of research includes logic programming, deductive databases, database integration, and P2P systems.

For more information, contact Leopoldo Bertossi (bertossi@scs.carleton.ca)