{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Evidential Reasoning in Semantic Networks: A Formal Theory","authors":[{"name":"Lokendra Shastri","slug":"lokendra-shastri","given":"Lokendra","family":"Shastri","affiliation":""},{"name":"Jerome A. Feldman","slug":"jerome-a-feldman","given":"Jerome A.","family":"Feldman","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"This paper presents an evidential approach to kn o wledge representation and inference wherein the prin ciple of maximum entropy is applied to deal with uncertainty and incompleteness. It focuses on a restricted rep resentation language - similar in expressive power to se mantic network formalisms. and develops a formal th eo ry of evidential inheritance wtthin this language. The th eo ry applies to a limited, but we think interesting, class o f inh eritance problems including those that involve exceptions and multiple inheritance hierarchies. The lan guage and the accompanying evidential inference structure provide a natural treatment of defaults and conllicting information. The evidence combination rule propos ed in this paper is incremental, commutative and C~ ssoc iative and hence, shares most of the attractive fea tures o f the Dempster-Shafer evidence combination rul e. Furthermore. it is demonstrably better than the Dempster-Shafer rule in the context of the problems a ddr ess ed in this paper. The resulting theory can be implem ented as a highly parall el (connectionist) network made up o f active elements that can solve inheritance pro bl ems in time proportional to the depth of the conceptual hierarchy.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/92","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/0092.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/92.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/bibtex/92","volume":{"slug":"1985","title":"Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1985","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/","year":1985,"location":"Los Angeles, California, USA","dates":"","editors":"Aravind Joshi","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Knowledge Representation","track":"Knowledge Representation","number":92,"pages":{"first":465,"last":473},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}