A Reasoning System for a First-Order Logic of Limited Belief

A Reasoning System for a First-Order Logic of Limited Belief

Christoph Schwering

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1247-1253. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/173

Logics of limited belief aim at enabling computationally feasible reasoning in highly expressive representation languages. These languages are often dialects of first-order logic with a weaker form of logical entailment that keeps reasoning decidable or even tractable. While a number of such logics have been proposed in the past, they tend to remain for theoretical analysis only and their practical relevance is very limited. In this paper, we aim to go beyond the theory. Building on earlier work by Liu, Lakemeyer, and Levesque, we develop a logic of limited belief that is highly expressive but remains decidable in the first-order and tractable in the propositional case and exhibits some characteristics that make it attractive for an implementation. We introduce a reasoning system that employs this logic as representation language and present experimental results that showcase the benefit of limited belief.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Knowledge Representation Languages
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Non-classical logics for Knowledge Representation
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Reasoning about Knowlege and Belief