DFG-Project Ratiolog: Rational Extensions of Logical Reasoning

Human reasoning does not strictly follow the rules of classical logic. Explanations for this may be incomplete knowledge, incorrect beliefs, or inconsistent norms. From the very beginning of artificial intelligence (AI) research, there has been a strong emphasis on incorporating mechanisms for rationality into AI reasoning systems. Rationality cannot be restricted to cognitive tasks solely, but involves complex behavior and interaction with other subjects and the environment.

This project aims at establishing a joint model for reasoning and behavior. For this, we will combine logical reasoning with the modeling of continuous systems by building on previous works on non-monotonic calculi and hybrid automata.We will extend classical logical reasoning by various forms of non-monotonic aspects, e.g. abduction or defeasible argumentation. This will not be done on a theoretical level only, but these extensions will be incorporated into the existing reasoning system E-KRHyper. The open domain question answering (QA) system LogAnswer that uses E-KRHyper and the free encyclopedia Wikipedia for answering natural-language questions will be turned into a system for rational question answering, which offers an excellent testbed for evaluating rational reasoning.



Project leader: Prof. Dr. Frieder Stolzenburg
Assistant: Dr. Claus-Peter Wirth
Duration: June 4, 2013 to December 3, 2015
Third-Party Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Partner: Working Group Sr. Prof. Dr. Furbach, Inst. für Informatik, Universität Koblenz-Landau