Bundy, Alan
Evaluating the Meta- and Object-Level Reasoning of Large Language Models for Question Answering
Ferguson, Nick, Guillou, Liane, Bundy, Alan, Nuamah, Kwabena
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language tasks but still face challenges in Question Answering (QA) tasks requiring complex, multi-step reasoning. We outline the types of reasoning required in some of these tasks, and reframe them in terms of meta-level reasoning (akin to high-level strategic reasoning or planning) and object-level reasoning (embodied in lower-level tasks such as mathematical reasoning). Franklin, a novel dataset with requirements of meta- and object-level reasoning, is introduced and used along with three other datasets to evaluate four LLMs at question answering tasks requiring multiple steps of reasoning. Results from human annotation studies suggest LLMs demonstrate meta-level reasoning with high frequency, but struggle with object-level reasoning tasks in some of the datasets used. Additionally, evidence suggests that LLMs find the object-level reasoning required for the questions in the Franklin dataset challenging, yet they do exhibit strong performance with respect to the meta-level reasoning requirements.
ALIST: Associative Logic for Inference, Storage and Transfer. A Lingua Franca for Inference on the Web
Nuamah, Kwabena, Bundy, Alan
Recent developments in support for constructing knowledge graphs have led to a rapid rise in their creation both on the Web and within organisations. Added to existing sources of data, including relational databases, APIs, etc., there is a strong demand for techniques to query these diverse sources of knowledge. While formal query languages, such as SPARQL, exist for querying some knowledge graphs, users are required to know which knowledge graphs they need to query and the unique resource identifiers of the resources they need. Although alternative techniques in neural information retrieval embed the content of knowledge graphs in vector spaces, they fail to provide the representation and query expressivity needed (e.g. inability to handle non-trivial aggregation functions such as regression). We believe that a lingua franca, i.e. a formalism, that enables such representational flexibility will increase the ability of intelligent automated agents to combine diverse data sources by inference. Our work proposes a flexible representation (alists) to support intelligent federated querying of diverse knowledge sources. Our contribution includes (1) a formalism that abstracts the representation of queries from the specific query language of a knowledge graph; (2) a representation to dynamically curate data and functions (operations) to perform non-trivial inference over diverse knowledge sources; (3) a demonstration of the expressiveness of alists to represent the diversity of representational formalisms, including SPARQL queries, and more generally first-order logic expressions.
Incidence Calculus: A Mechanism for Probabilistic Reasoning
Bundy, Alan
Mechanisms for the automation of uncertainty are required for expert systems. Sometimes these mechanisms need to obey the properties of probabilistic reasoning. A purely numeric mechanism, like those proposed so far, cannot provide a probabilistic logic with truth functional connectives. We propose an alternative mechanism, Incidence Calculus, which is based on a representation of uncertainty using sets of points, which might represent situations, models or possible worlds. Incidence Calculus does provide a probabilistic logic with truth functional connectives.
On Some Equivalence Relations between Incidence Calculus and Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence
da Silva, F. Correa, Bundy, Alan
Incidence Calculus and Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence are both theories to describe agents' degrees of belief in propositions, thus being appropriate to represent uncertainty in reasoning systems. This paper presents a straightforward equivalence proof between some special cases of these theories.
Using Linked Data for Semi-Automatic Guesstimation
Abourbih, Jonathan Alexander (University of Edinburgh) | Bundy, Alan (University of Edinburgh) | McNeill, Fiona (University of Edinburgh)
GORT is a system that combines Linked Data from across several Semantic Web data sources to solve guesstimation problems, with user assistance. The system uses customised inference rules over the relationships in the OpenCyc ontology, combined with data from DBPedia, to reason and perform its calculations. The system is extensible with new Linked Data, as it becomes available, and is capable of answering a small range of guesstimation questions.
IJCAI Policy on Multiple Publication of Papers
Bundy, Alan
The Nature of AI: A Reply to Schank
Bundy, Alan
A fifth answer is also advanced, but is immediately withdrawn. The Innovative Answer: "It also usually means getting fact, there are enough opinions for four men. Roger Schanks, and disagree with the other three. As & hank points out, this is unsatisfactory because it leads Schank hoped that his article would start a debate on to a shifting definition of AI. the issues he raised. Another of these answers, the learning answer, can also What are Schank's four views? Anyone who attempts to clarify a In answer to his question "What is AI all about?", he vague term, like AI, is allowed a certain amount of license in claims to see only two possible answers. The Scientific Answer: "that AI is concerned with highlighting other uses, but there are limits to this license.
How to Get the Most Out of IJCAI-83
Bundy, Alan
When I took on the job of programme chairman of IJCAI-83 the trustees presented me with a list of problems with the way IJCAI programmes had traditionally been organized. Some of these problems had been raised by previous programme chairmen, some by attendees and some been subsequently been raised by me. I have tried to organise the IJCAI-83 programme to solve these problems -or at least some of them, I have been unable to devise a scheme which simultaneously solves all the problems. (I leave this as an exercise for the reader.) My plans converged after consultation with many people in the AI community, including the IJCAI-83 conference committee, and they have that committee's approval. Inevitably this means that IJCAI-83 will be a little different from here-to -fore, and in order for my changes to be also solutions, it is necessary for you, the paying customer, to be aware of these differences and to take advantage of them. The aim of this article is to raise you awareness.