What does a conditional knowledge base entail?

dc.creatorLehmann, Daniel
dc.creatorMagidor, Menachem
dc.date2002-02-18
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T03:18:08Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T03:18:08Z
dc.descriptionThis paper presents a logical approach to nonmonotonic reasoning based on the notion of a nonmonotonic consequence relation. A conditional knowledge base, consisting of a set of conditional assertions of the type "if ... then ...", represents the explicit defeasible knowledge an agent has about the way the world generally behaves. We look for a plausible definition of the set of all conditional assertions entailed by a conditional knowledge base. In a previous paper, S. Kraus and the authors defined and studied "preferential" consequence relations. They noticed that not all preferential relations could be considered as reasonable inference procedures. This paper studies a more restricted class of consequence relations, "rational" relations. It is argued that any reasonable nonmonotonic inference procedure should define a rational relation. It is shown that the rational relations are exactly those that may be represented by a "ranked" preferential model, or by a (non-standard) probabilistic model. The rational closure of a conditional knowledge base is defined and shown to provide an attractive answer to the question of the title. Global properties of this closure operation are proved: it is a cumulative operation. It is also computationally tractable. This paper assumes the underlying language is propositional.
dc.descriptionPreliminary version presented at KR'89. Minor corrections of the Journal Version
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0202022
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0202022
dc.identifierJournal of Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 55 no.1 (May 1992) pp. 1-60. Erratum in Vol. 68 (1994) p. 411
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/30992
dc.subjectArtificial Intelligence
dc.subjectI.2.3
dc.titleWhat does a conditional knowledge base entail?
dc.typetext

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