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International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

EMAS 2018: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems pp 158–180Cite as

Belief Shadowing

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11375))

Abstract

Adapting beliefs to new circumstances, like belief change, update, revision or merging, typically requires deep and/or complex adjustments of belief bases even when adaptations happen to be transient. We present a novel, lightweight and tractable approach to a new kind of beliefs’ interference which we call belief shadowing. Put simply, it is a transient swap of beliefs when part of one belief base is to be shadowed by another belief base representing new observations and/or beliefs of superior agents/teams. In this case no changes to belief bases are needed. This substantially improves the performance of systems based on doxastic reasoning. We ensure tractability of our formal framework, what makes it suitable for real-world applications.

The presented approach is based on a carefully chosen four-valued paraconsistent logic with truth values representing truth, falsity, incompleteness and inconsistency. Moreover, potentially undesired or forbidden conclusions are prevented by integrity constrains together with their shadowing machinery.

As an implementation environment we use \(4\hbox {QL}^{\mathrm{Bel}}\), a recently developed four-valued query language based on the same underlying logic and providing necessary reasoning tools. Importantly, the shadowing techniques are general enough to be embedded in any reasoning environment addressing related phenomena.

Supported by the Polish National Science Centre grant 2015/19/B/ST6/02589, the ELLIIT network organization for Information and Communication Technology, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SymbiKBot Project).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    AGM is an acronym referring to names of originators of the theory: Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson [2].

  2. 2.

    In fact, in implementation we allow restricted quantifiers, where we have to specify a domain the variable bound by the quantifier ranges over.

  3. 3.

    For motivations behind \(\le _t\) see, e.g., [3, 41].

  4. 4.

    That is, the value of \(\left\langle {Formula}\right\rangle \) contains some truth.

  5. 5.

    The use of 4QL-like approach to argumentation is investigated, e.g., in [9, 10].

  6. 6.

    Tuples for which the query is evaluated to are not listed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Łukasz Białek, Barbara Dunin-Kęplicz & Andrzej Szałas

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Andrzej Szałas

Authors
  1. Łukasz Białek
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  2. Barbara Dunin-Kęplicz
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  3. Andrzej Szałas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrzej Szałas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

  2. Department of Computer Science, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, Università degli Studi di Genova, Genoa, Italy

    Viviana Mascardi

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Cesena, Forli/Cesana, Italy

    Alessandro Ricci

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Białek, Ł., Dunin-Kęplicz, B., Szałas, A. (2019). Belief Shadowing. In: Weyns, D., Mascardi, V., Ricci, A. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25693-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25693-7_9

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