A temporal argumentative system

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Augusto, Juan C. | Simari, Guillermo R.

Affiliations: Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Nacional del Sur Bahía Blanca, Argentina E‐mail: [jca,grs]@cs.uns.edu.ar

Abstract: There are numerous areas in Computer Science where time plays a fundamental role. This role is not a minor one in Artificial Intelligence. Since the goal of Artificial Intelligence is to capture the human abilities for problem solving, the consideration of temporal concepts becomes indispensable. An intelligent agent uses temporal references in its communication and in its deductive processes constantly and decisively. Therefore, a great number of formalisms have been proposed to provide temporal reasoning capabilities. During the last few years, as part of the work developed in the nonmonotonic reasoning area, the argumentative systems have been developed. These systems were designed to provide defeasible or tentative reasoning capabilities. Here we explore the confluence of both areas: temporal and defeasible reasoning. Our purpose is to add to the argumentative reasoning language the possibility of explicitly referencing time to be able to reason about occurrences taking into account the moment in which they took place.

Keywords: Knowledge representation , defeasible reasoning , temporal reasoning

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 237-257, 1999