Full Text Available

Note: Clicking the button above will open the full text document at the original institutional repository in a new window.

Explanation for defeasible entailment

Explanation facilities are an essential part of tools for knowledge representation and reasoning systems. Knowledge representation and reasoning systems allow users to capture information about the world and reason about it. They are useful in understanding entailments which allow users to derive im...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Chama, Victoria
Other Authors: Meyer, Thomas
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Department of Computer Science 2020
Subjects:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1867613219357458433
access_status_str Open Access
author Chama, Victoria
author2 Meyer, Thomas
author_browse Chama, Victoria
Meyer, Thomas
author_facet Meyer, Thomas
Chama, Victoria
author_sort Chama, Victoria
collection Thesis
description Explanation facilities are an essential part of tools for knowledge representation and reasoning systems. Knowledge representation and reasoning systems allow users to capture information about the world and reason about it. They are useful in understanding entailments which allow users to derive implicit knowledge that can be made explicit through inferences. Additionally, explanations also assist users in debugging and repairing knowledge bases when conflicts arise. Understanding the conclusions drawn from logic-based systems are complex and requires expert knowledge, especially when defeasible knowledge bases are taken into account for both expert and general users. A defeasible knowledge base represents statements that can be retracted because they refer to information in which there are exceptions to stated rules. That is, any defeasible statement is one that may be withdrawn upon learning of an exception. Explanations for classical logics such as description logics which are well-known formalisms for reasoning about information in a given domain are provided through the notion of justifications. Simply providing or listing the statements that are responsible for an entailment in the classical case is enough to justify an entailment. However, when looking at the defeasible case where entailed statements can be retracted, this is not adequate because the way in which entailment is performed is more complicated than the classical case. In this dissertation, we combine explanations with a particular approach to dealing with defeasible reasoning. We provide an algorithm to compute justification-based explanations for defeasible knowledge bases. It is shown that in order to accurately derive justifications for defeasible knowledge bases, we need to establish the point at which conflicts arise by using an algorithm to come up with a ranking of defeasible statements. This means that only a portion of the knowledge is considered because the statements that cause conflicts are discarded. The final algorithm consists of two parts; the first part establishes the point at which the conflicts occur and the second part uses the information obtained from the first algorithm to compute justifications for defeasible knowledge bases.
format Thesis
id oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/32206
institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:32:39.476Z
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2020
publishDateRange 2020
publishDateSort 2020
publisher Department of Computer Science
publisherStr Department of Computer Science
record_format dspace
source_str UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/32206 Explanation for defeasible entailment Chama, Victoria Meyer, Thomas Computer Science Explanation facilities are an essential part of tools for knowledge representation and reasoning systems. Knowledge representation and reasoning systems allow users to capture information about the world and reason about it. They are useful in understanding entailments which allow users to derive implicit knowledge that can be made explicit through inferences. Additionally, explanations also assist users in debugging and repairing knowledge bases when conflicts arise. Understanding the conclusions drawn from logic-based systems are complex and requires expert knowledge, especially when defeasible knowledge bases are taken into account for both expert and general users. A defeasible knowledge base represents statements that can be retracted because they refer to information in which there are exceptions to stated rules. That is, any defeasible statement is one that may be withdrawn upon learning of an exception. Explanations for classical logics such as description logics which are well-known formalisms for reasoning about information in a given domain are provided through the notion of justifications. Simply providing or listing the statements that are responsible for an entailment in the classical case is enough to justify an entailment. However, when looking at the defeasible case where entailed statements can be retracted, this is not adequate because the way in which entailment is performed is more complicated than the classical case. In this dissertation, we combine explanations with a particular approach to dealing with defeasible reasoning. We provide an algorithm to compute justification-based explanations for defeasible knowledge bases. It is shown that in order to accurately derive justifications for defeasible knowledge bases, we need to establish the point at which conflicts arise by using an algorithm to come up with a ranking of defeasible statements. This means that only a portion of the knowledge is considered because the statements that cause conflicts are discarded. The final algorithm consists of two parts; the first part establishes the point at which the conflicts occur and the second part uses the information obtained from the first algorithm to compute justifications for defeasible knowledge bases. 2020-09-10T07:52:08Z 2020-09-10T07:52:08Z 2020 2020-09-10T07:51:46Z Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32206 eng application/pdf Department of Computer Science Faculty of Science
spellingShingle Computer Science
Chama, Victoria
Explanation for defeasible entailment
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Explanation for defeasible entailment
title_full Explanation for defeasible entailment
title_fullStr Explanation for defeasible entailment
title_full_unstemmed Explanation for defeasible entailment
title_short Explanation for defeasible entailment
title_sort explanation for defeasible entailment
topic Computer Science
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32206
work_keys_str_mv AT chamavictoria explanationfordefeasibleentailment