Belief revision by examples

When integrating information coming from different sources, a distinction is made between revision [13, 5, 14, 28, 6] (new information more reliable than old) and merging [22, 4, 18] (same reliability). More generally, priorities or weights are assigned to the sources to indicate their reliability [26, 27, 30, 7]. Measures and aggregation functions allow for fine-grained policies of integration [16, 11, 18]. Families of operators are then defined, all depending in a way or another from the relative reliability of the sources. The two basic cases of non-iterated revision and merging result from giving priority to the new information or the same to all pieces of information to be incorporated, respectively. The strenght of information sources has been studied in the field of cognitive psychology, where it was determined to depend on the order in which the information is given [32], on the size of the group generating it [25] and other social factors [31]. The first time merging is done, the relative reliability of the pieces of information to be integrated cannot come other than from sources external to the merging process. However, subsequent mergings may then take advantage from the previous results.