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Revising event calculus theories to recover from unexpected observations

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Abstract

Recent extensions of the Event Calculus resulted in powerful formalisms, able to reason about a multitude of commonsense phenomena in causal domains, involving epistemic notions, functional fluents and probabilistic aspects, among others. Less attention has been paid to the problem of automatically revising (correcting) a Knowledge Base when an observation contradicts inferences made regarding the world state. Despite mature work on the related belief revision field, adapting such results for the case of action theories is non-trivial. This paper describes how to address this problem for deterministic, yet partially observable, domains, by proposing a generic framework in the context of the Event Calculus, along with ASP encodings of the revision algorithm and a web-based tester of the formalism implementation.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and very detailed comments, who helped improve significantly the content of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Heraklion, Greece

    Nikoleta Tsampanaki, Theodore Patkos, Giorgos Flouris & Dimitris Plexousakis

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  1. Nikoleta Tsampanaki
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  2. Theodore Patkos
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  3. Giorgos Flouris
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  4. Dimitris Plexousakis
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Correspondence to Nikoleta Tsampanaki.

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Tsampanaki, N., Patkos, T., Flouris, G. et al. Revising event calculus theories to recover from unexpected observations. Ann Math Artif Intell 89, 209–236 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-019-09663-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-019-09663-5

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