A Fundamental Problem (or: a Unifying Theme) for Knowledge Representation &
Reasoning
Last Update: 27 August 2008
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The task of a KRR system is to represent and reason about (and to
enable action on) some domain (= "the world")
This might take the form of a computer system to help people
E.g., a geographic information system,
a question-answering system,
a knowledge base (i.e., an
AI version of a database)
or it might take the form of a computational cognitive agent.
In either case, there might be more than one source
of information:
multiple senses
multiple informants
In the case of multiple senses, some of the information from one
sense might originate in some domain-object, and some of the information
from another sense might originate in the same domain-object:
Cf. the "binding" problem of neuroscience:
binding the color, shape, etc., of a physical
object into an experience of a single
object with many properties
instead of experiences of multiple
objects each with only one property
In the case of multiple informants, there are 2 problems:
How to evaluate the trustworthiness of the informants
Leads to belief-revision/truth-maintenance issues
This also applies to sensory input, e.g., in
color perception
How to correlate their information
Cf. the binding problem
E.g., are the informants talking about the same
thing?
Leads to issues in:
node merging/splitting
Maida, Anthony S., & Shapiro, Stuart C. (1982),
"Intensional Concepts in Propositional Semantic Networks", Cognitive
Science 6: 291-330; reprinted in Ronald J. Brachman & Hector J.
Levesque (eds.), Readings in Knowledge Representation (Los Altos, CA:
Morgan Kaufmann, 1985): 169-189.
Maida, Anthony S. (1991),
"Maintaining Mental Models of Agents Who
Have Existential Misconceptions", Artificial Intelligence 50(3):
331-383.
Santore, John F., & Shapiro, Stuart C. (2004),
"A Cognitive Robotics
Approach to Identifying Perceptually Indistinguishable Objects", in Alan
Schultz (ed.), The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From
Interfaces to Intelligence, Papers from the 2004 AAAI Fall Symposium,
Technical Report FS-04-05 (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press): 47-54.
Campbell, Alistair E., & Shapiro, Stuart C. (1998),
"Algorithms for
Ontological Mediation", in S. Harabagiu (ed.), Usage of WordNet in Natural
Language Processing Systems: Proceedings of the Workshop, COLING-ACL
1998:
102-107.
Use negotiation
Rapaport, William J. (2003), "What Did You Mean by
That? Misunderstanding, Negotiation, and Syntactic Semantics",
Minds and Machines 13(3): 397-427.
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