Deriving conclusions from non-monotonic cause-effect relations

DOI10.1017/S1471068416000466zbMATH Open1379.68291arXiv1608.00867OpenAlexW2963575115MaRDI QIDQ4593049FDOQ4593049

Authors: Jorge Fandinno 

Publication date: 9 November 2017

Published in: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We present an extension of Logic Programming (under stable models semantics) that, not only allows concluding whether a true atom is a cause of another atom, but also deriving new conclusions from these causal-effect relations. This is expressive enough to capture informal rules like "if some agent's actions $mathcalA$ have been necessary to cause an event $E$ then conclude atom $caused(mathcalA,E)$," something that, to the best of our knowledge, had not been formalised in the literature. To this aim, we start from a first attempt that proposed extending the syntax of logic programs with so-called causal literals. These causal literals are expressions that can be used in rule bodies and allow inspecting the derivation of some atom $A$ in the program with respect to some query function $phi$. Depending on how these query functions are defined, we can model different types of causal relations such as sufficient, necessary or contributory causes, for instance. The initial approach was specifically focused on monotonic query functions. This was enough to cover sufficient cause-effect relations but, unfortunately, necessary and contributory are essentially non-monotonic. In this work, we define a semantics for non-monotonic causal literals showing that, not only extends the stable model semantics for normal logic programs, but also preserves many of its usual desirable properties for the extended syntax. Using this new semantics, we provide precise definitions of necessary and contributory causal relations and briefly explain their behaviour on a pair of typical examples from the Knowledge Representation literature. (Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming)

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00867

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Knowledge representation (68T30) Logic programming (68N17) Logic in artificial intelligence (68T27)

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Cited In (5)

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Answering the ``why in answer set programming -- a survey of explanation approaches
• Contrastive explanations for answer-set programs
• Towards deriving conclusions from cause-effect relations

Uses Software

• CCalc

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