This paper presents a new ontology that implements the well-known Deontic Traditional Scheme in RDFs and SPARQL, fit to handle irresolvable conflicts, i.e., situations in which two or more statements prescribe conflicting obligations, prohibitions, or permissions, with none of them being "stronger" than the other one(s). In our view, this paper marks a significant advancement in standard theoretical research in formal Deontic Logic. Most contemporary approaches in this field are confined to the propositional level, mainly focus on the notion of obligation, and lack implementations. The proposed framework is encoded in RDF, which is not only a first-order language but also the most widely used knowledge representation language, as it forms the foundation of the Semantic Web. Moreover, the proposed computational ontology formalizes all deontic modalities defined in the Deontic Traditional Scheme, without specifically focusing on obligations, and offers constructs to model and reason with various types of irresolvable conflicts, violations, and the interaction between deontic modalities and contextual constraints in a given state of affairs. To the best of our knowledge, no existing approach in the literature addresses all these aspects within a unified integrated framework. All examples presented and discussed in this paper, together with Java code and clear instructions to re-execute them locally, are available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/conflict-tolerantDeonticTraditionalScheme

Conceptualization, or viewing entities and situations as instances of abstract concepts in mind and making inferences based on that, is a vital component in human intelligence for commonsense reasoning. Despite recent progress in artificial intelligence to acquire and model commonsense attributed to neural language models and commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs), conceptualization is yet to be introduced thoroughly, making current approaches ineffective to cover knowledge about countless diverse entities and situations in the real world. To address the problem, we thoroughly study the role of conceptualization in commonsense reasoning, and formulate a framework to replicate human conceptual induction by acquiring abstract knowledge about events regarding abstract concepts, as well as higher-level triples or inferences upon them. We then apply the framework to ATOMIC, a large-scale human-annotated CKG, aided by the taxonomy Probase. We annotate a dataset on the validity of contextualized conceptualizations from ATOMIC on both event and triple levels, develop a series of heuristic rules based on linguistic features, and train a set of neural models to generate and verify abstract knowledge. Based on these components, a pipeline to acquire abstract knowledge is built. A large abstract CKG upon ATOMIC is then induced, ready to be instantiated to infer about unseen entities or situations. Finally, we empirically show the benefits of augmenting CKGs with abstract knowledge in downstream tasks like commonsense inference and zero-shot commonsense QA.

This paper introduces a novel concept of interval probability measures that enables the representation of imprecise probabilities, or uncertainty, in a natural and coherent manner. Within an algebra of sets, we introduce a notion of weak complementation denoted as $\psi$. The interval probability measure of an event $H$ is defined with respect to the set of indecisive eventualities $(\psi(H))^c$, which is included in the standard complement $H^c$. We characterize a broad class of interval probability measures and define their properties. Additionally, we establish an updating rule with respect to $H$, incorporating concepts of statistical independence and dependence. The interval distribution of a random variable is formulated, and a corresponding definition of stochastic dominance between two random variables is introduced. As a byproduct, a formal solution to the century-old Keynes-Ramsey controversy is presented.

Cognitive research indicates that abstraction ability is essential in human intelligence, which remains under-explored in language models. In this paper, we present AbsPyramid, a unified entailment graph of 221K textual descriptions of abstraction knowledge. While existing resources only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains, AbsPyramid collects abstract knowledge for three components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models in the open domain. Experimental results demonstrate that current LLMs face challenges comprehending abstraction knowledge in zero-shot and few-shot settings. By training on our rich abstraction knowledge, we find LLMs can acquire basic abstraction abilities and generalize to unseen events. In the meantime, we empirically show that our benchmark is comprehensive to enhance LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks.

Querying knowledge graphs (KGs) using deep learning approaches can naturally leverage the reasoning and generalization ability to learn to infer better answers. Traditional neural complex query answering (CQA) approaches mostly work on entity-centric KGs. However, in the real world, we also need to make logical inferences about events, states, and activities (i.e., eventualities or situations) to push learning systems from System I to System II, as proposed by Yoshua Bengio. Querying logically from an EVentuality-centric KG (EVKG) can naturally provide references to such kind of intuitive and logical inference. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new framework to leverage neural methods to answer complex logical queries based on an EVKG, which can satisfy not only traditional first-order logic constraints but also implicit logical constraints over eventualities concerning their occurrences and orders. For instance, if we know that "Food is bad" happens before "PersonX adds soy sauce", then "PersonX adds soy sauce" is unlikely to be the cause of "Food is bad" due to implicit temporal constraint. To facilitate consistent reasoning on EVKGs, we propose Complex Eventuality Query Answering (CEQA), a more rigorous definition of CQA that considers the implicit logical constraints governing the temporal order and occurrence of eventualities. In this manner, we propose to leverage theorem provers for constructing benchmark datasets to ensure the answers satisfy implicit logical constraints. We also propose a Memory-Enhanced Query Encoding (MEQE) approach to significantly improve the performance of state-of-the-art neural query encoders on the CEQA task.

Let two sequences of eventualities x (signifying the sequence, x0,x1, x2,...,xn-1) and y (signifying the sequence, y0, y1, y2,..,yn-1) both recur over the same time interval and it is required to determine whether or not a subinterval exists within the said interval which is a common subinterval of the intervals of occurrence of xp and yq. This paper presents two algorithms for solving the problem. the first explores an arbitrary cycle of the double recurrence for the existence of such an interval. its worst case running time is quadratic. The other algorithm is based on the novel notion of gcd-partitions and has a linear worst case running time. If the eventuality sequence pair (W,z) is a gcd-partition for the double recurrence (x, y),then, from a certain property of gcd-partitions, within any cycle of the double recurrence, there exists r and s such that intervals of occurrence of xp and yq are non-disjoint with the interval of co-occurrence of wr and zs. As such, a coincidence between xp and yq occurs within a cycle of the double recurrence if and only if such r and s exist so that the interval of co-occurrence of wr and zs shares a common interval with the common interval of occurrences of xp and yq. The algorithm systematically reduces the number of wr and zs pairs to be explored in the process of finding the existence of the coincidence.

With direct funding plus prize cash that reached into the hundreds of thousands, DARPA inspired worldwide collaborations amongst prime educational establishments in addition to business. A sequence of three preliminary circuit occasions would give groups expertise with every atmosphere. In the course of the Tunnel Circuit occasion, which happened in August 2019 within the Nationwide Institute for Occupational Security and Well being's experimental coal mine, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, many groups misplaced communication with their robots after the primary bend within the tunnel. Six months later, on the City Circuit occasion, held at an unfinished nuclear energy station in Satsop, Wash., groups beefed up their communications with every part from an easy tethered Ethernet cable to battery-powered mesh community nodes that robots would drop like breadcrumbs as they went alongside, ideally simply earlier than they handed out of communication vary. The Cave Circuit, scheduled for the autumn of 2020, was canceled on account of COVID-19. By the point groups reached the SubT Remaining Occasion within the Louisville Mega Cavern, the main target was on autonomy slightly than communications.

Commonsense knowledge acquisition and reasoning have long been a core artificial intelligence problem. However, in the past, there has been a lack of scalable methods to collect commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose to develop principles for collecting commonsense knowledge based on selectional preference. We generalize the definition of selectional preference from one-hop linguistic syntactic relations to higher-order relations over linguistic graphs. Unlike previous commonsense knowledge definition (e.g., ConceptNet), the selectional preference (SP) knowledge only relies on statistical distribution over linguistic graphs, which can be efficiently and accurately acquired from the unlabeled corpus with modern tools. Following this principle, we develop a large-scale eventuality (a linguistic term covering activity, state, and event)-based knowledge graph ASER, where each eventuality is represented as a dependency graph, and the relation between them is a discourse relation defined in shallow discourse parsing. The higher-order selectional preference over collected linguistic graphs reflects various kinds of commonsense knowledge. Moreover, motivated by the observation that humans understand events by abstracting the observed events to a higher level and can thus transferring their knowledge to new events, we propose a conceptualization module to significantly boost the coverage of ASER. In total, ASER contains 438 million eventualities and 648 million edges between eventualities. After conceptualization with Probase, a selectional preference based concept-instance relational knowledge base, our concept graph contains 15 million conceptualized eventualities and 224 million edges between them. Detailed analysis is provided to demonstrate its quality. All the collected data, APIs, and tools are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/ASER.