Sequence classification is central to many practical problems within machine learning. Distances metrics between arbitrary pairs of sequences can be hard to define because sequences can vary in length and the information contained in the order of sequence elements is lost when standard metrics such as Euclidean distance are applied. We present a scheme that employs a Hidden Markov Model variant to produce a set of fixed-length description vectors from a set of sequences. We then define three inference algorithms, a Baum-Welch variant, a Gibbs Sampling algorithm, and a variational algorithm, to infer model parameters. Finally, we show experimentally that the fixed length representation produced by these inference methods is useful for classifying sequences of amino acids into structural classes

The Game Description Language is a high-level, rule-based formalisms for communicating the rules of arbitrary  games to general game-playing systems, whose challenging task is to learn to play previously unknown games without human intervention. Originally designed for deterministic games with complete information about the game state, the language was recently extended to include randomness and imperfect information. However, determining the extent to which this enhancement allows to describe truly arbitrary games was left as an open problem. We provide a positive answer to this question by relating the extended Game Description Language to the universal, mathematical concept of extensive-form games, proving that indeed just any such game can be described faithfully.

Uncertainty and vagueness are pervasive phenomena in real-life knowledge. They are supported in extended description logics that adapt classical description logics to deal with numerical probabilities or fuzzy truth degrees. While the two concepts are distinguished for good reasons, they combine in the notion of probably, which is ultimately a fuzzy qualification of probabilities. Here, we develop existing propositional logics of fuzzy probability into a full-blown description logic, and we show decidability of several variants of this logic under Lukasiewicz semantics. We obtain these results in a novel generic framework of fuzzy coalgebraic logic; this enables us to extend our results to logics that combine crisp ingredients including standard crisp roles and crisp numerical probabilities with fuzzy roles and fuzzy probabilities.

The paper introduces a logical framework for negotiation among dishonest agents. The framework relies on the use of abductive logic programming as a knowledge representation language for agents to deal with incomplete information and preferences. The paper shows how intentionally false or inaccurate information of agents could be encoded in the agents' knowledge bases. Such disinformation can be effectively used in the process of negotiation to have desired outcomes by agents. The negotiation processes are formulated under the answer set semantics of abductive logic programming and enable the exploration of various strategies that agents can employ in their negotiation

Since the seminal work of Sampath et al. in 1996, despite the subsequent flourishing of techniques on diagnosis of discrete-event systems (DESs), the basic notions of fault and diagnosis have been remaining conceptually unchanged. Faults are defined at component level and diagnoses incorporate the occurrences of component faults within system evolutions: diagnosis is context-free. As this approach may be unsatisfactory for a complex DES, whose topology is organized in a hierarchy of abstractions, we propose to define different diagnosis rules for different subsystems in the hierarchy. Relevant fault patterns are specified as regular expressions on patterns of lower-level subsystems. Separation of concerns is achieved and the expressive power of diagnosis is enhanced: each subsystem has its proper set of diagnosis rules, which may or may not depend on the rules of other subsystems. Diagnosis is no longer anchored to components: it becomes context-sensitive. The approach yields seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possible scenarios: a subsystem can be normal despite the faulty behavior of a number of its components (positive paradox); also, it can be faulty despite the normal behavior of all its components (negative paradox).

Many applications of causal inference, such as finding the relationship between stock prices and news reports, involve both discrete and continuous variables observed over time. Inference with these complex sets of temporal data, though, has remained difficult and required a number of simplifications. We show that recent approaches for inferring temporal relationships (represented as logical formulas) can be adapted for inference with continuous valued effects. Building on advances in logic, PCTLc (an extension of PCTL with numerical constraints) is introduced here to allow representation and inference of relationships with a mixture of discrete and continuous components. Then, finding significant relationships in the continuous case can be done using the conditional expectation of an effect, rather than its conditional probability. We evaluate this approach on both synthetically generated and actual financial market data, demonstrating that it can allow us to answer different questions than the discrete approach can.

Probabilistic logics which is followed by the development of the main methods that support reasoning with probability distributions, used in generalising probabilistic Boolean interaction, and, such as ProbLog, use an implicit definition finally, default logic is briefly discussed. We will use probabilistic of an interaction rule to combine probabilistic evidence Boolean interaction as a sound and generic, algebraic about atoms. In this paper, we show that way to combine uncertain evidence, whereas default this interaction rule is an example of a more general logic will be used as our language to implement the interaction class of interactions that can be described by nonmonotonic operators, again reflecting this double perspective on the logics. We furthermore show that such probabilistic logic. The new probabilistic logical framework local interactions about the probability of an atom is described in Section 3 and compared to other approaches can be described by convolution. The resulting extended in Section 4. The achievements of this research are reflected probabilistic logic supports nonmonotonic upon in Section 5. reasoning with probabilistic information.

Learning concepts via instruction and expository texts is an important problem for modeling human learning and for making autonomous AI systems. This paper describes a computational model of the self-explanation effect, whereby conceptual knowledge is repaired by integrating and explaining new material. Our model represents conceptual knowledge with compositional model fragments, which are used to explain new material via model formulation. Preferences are computed over explanations and conceptual knowledge, along several dimensions. These preferences guide knowledge integration and question-answering. Our simulation learns about the human circulatory system, using facts from a circulatory system passage used in a previous cognitive psychology experiment. We analyze the simulation’s performance, showing that individual differences in sequences of models learned by students can be explained by different parameter settings in our model.

We present a unifying approach to the efficient evaluation of propositional answer-set programs. Our approach is based on backdoors which are small sets of atoms that represent "clever reasoning shortcuts" through the search space. The concept of backdoors is widely used in the areas of propositional satisfiability and constraint satisfaction. We show how this concept can be adapted to the nonmonotonic setting and how it allows to augment various known tractable subproblems, such as the evaluation of Horn and acyclic programs. In order to use backdoors we need to find them first. We utilize recent advances in fixed-parameter algorithmics to detect small backdoors. This implies fixed-parameter tractability of the evaluation of propositional answer-set programs, parameterized by the size of backdoors. Hence backdoor size provides a structural parameter similar to the treewidth parameter previously considered. We show that backdoor size and treewidth are incomparable, hence there are instances that are hard for one and easy for the other parameter. We complement our theoretical results with first empirical results.

Multi-context systems (MCS) are a powerful framework for interlinking heterogeneous knowledge sources. They model the flow of information among different reasoning components (called contexts) in a declarative way, using so-called bridge rules, where contexts and bridge rules may be nonmonotonic. We considerably generalize MCS to managed MCS (mMCS): while the original bridge rules can only add information to contexts, our generalization allows arbitrary operations on context knowledge bases to be freely defined, e.g., deletion or revision operators. The paper motivates and introduces the generalized framework and presents several interesting instances. Furthermore, we consider inconsistency management in mMCS and complexity issues.