Abduction

SCIENTIFIC CONTEXT:

Artificial Intelligence,

Automated Reasoning,

PARTICIPANTS:

Luca Console

Daniele Theseider Dupre'

Pietro Torasso

MAIN GOALS AND METHODOLOGY:

Formal specification of abductive reasoning (reasoning from effects to causes, from observations to hypotheses that explain them)

Study of the relation of abductive reasoning with other reasoning paradigms:

• deduction
• nonmonotonic reasoning
• database updates
• Characterization of abduction on knowledge bases at different levels of abstraction

MAIN RESULTS

Characterization of abduction as deduction on a completed theory

An extension of the definition of abduction for theories involving multiple levels of abstraction

RELATIONS WITH OTHER PROJECTS

Model-based diagnosis

COOPERATIONS

Other Italian Universities in MURST 40% project "Sistemi Intelligenti" (Intelligent Systems)

Other Italian Universities and research institutions for CNR project "Progetto Finalizzato Informatica"

MAIN REFERENCES

L. Console, D. Theseider Dupré and P. Torasso, On the Relationship between Abduction and Deduction, Journal of Logic and Computation, 1(5):661-690, 1991.

L. Console and D. Theseider Dupré, Abductive Reasoning with Abstraction Axioms, in Foundations of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning , pages 98-112, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 810, Springer Verlag , 1994.