knowledge representation formalism
A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge
Zhang, Heng, Jiang, Guifei, Quan, Donghui
There has been a longstanding dispute over which formalism is the best for representing knowledge in AI. The well-known "declarative vs. procedural controversy" is concerned with the choice of utilizing declarations or procedures as the primary mode of knowledge representation. The ongoing debate between symbolic AI and connectionist AI also revolves around the question of whether knowledge should be represented implicitly (e.g., as parametric knowledge in deep learning and large language models) or explicitly (e.g., as logical theories in traditional knowledge representation and reasoning). To address these issues, we propose a general framework to capture various knowledge representation formalisms in which we are interested. Within the framework, we find a family of universal knowledge representation formalisms, and prove that all universal formalisms are recursively isomorphic. Moreover, we show that all pairwise intertranslatable formalisms that admit the padding property are also recursively isomorphic. These imply that, up to an offline compilation, all universal (or natural and equally expressive) representation formalisms are in fact the same, which thus provides a partial answer to the aforementioned dispute.
Thimm
This paper presents Tweety, an open source project for scientific experimentation on logical aspects of artificial intelligence and particularly knowledge representation. Tweety provides a general framework for implementing and testing knowledge representation formalisms in a way that is familiar to researchers used to logical formalizations. This framework is very general, widely applicable, and can be used to implement a variety of knowledge representation formalisms from classical logics, over logic programming and computational models for argumentation, to probabilistic modeling approaches. Tweety already contains over 15 different knowledge representation formalisms and allows easy computation of examples, comparison of algorithms and approaches, and benchmark tests. This paper gives an overview on the technical architecture of Tweety and a description of its different libraries. We also provide two case studies that show how Tweety can be used for empirical evaluation of different problems in artificial intelligence.
Dubois
The square of opposition is a structure involving two involutive negations and relating quantified statements, invented in Aristotle time. Rediscovered in the second half of the XXth century, and advocated as being of interest for understanding conceptual structures and solving problems in paraconsistent logics, the square of opposition has been recently completed into a cube, which corresponds to the introduction of a third negation. Such a cube can be encountered in very different knowledge representation formalisms, such as modal logic, possibility theory in its all-or-nothing version, formal concept analysis, rough set theory and abstract argumentation. After restating these results in a unified perspective, the paper proposes a graded extension of the cube and shows that several qualitative, as well as quantitative formalisms, such as Sugeno integrals used in multiple criteria aggregation and qualitative decision theory, or yet belief functions and Choquet integrals, are amenable to transformations that form graded cubes of opposition. This discovery leads to a new perspective on many knowledge representation formalisms, laying bare their underlying common features. The cube of opposition exhibits fruitful parallelisms between different formalisms, which leads to highlight some missing components present in one formalism and currently absent from another.