CMSC 721 NONMONOTONIC REASONING



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Catalog Description

Survey of the major standard formalisms for nonmonotonic reasoning (e.g., circumscription, default logic), and examination of current research issues.

Prerequisites

CMSC 620 or equivalent, or permission of instructor.

Topics

Logic review (1 week)
- propositional, first-order, modal, and temporal logic
Introduction to nonmonotonic reasoning (NMR) (2 weeks)
- NMR in databases: closed-world assumption
- NMR in logic programming: negation as failure
- NMR in artificial intelligence: commonsense defaults
Standard formalisms (two or more of the following; 7 weeks)
- circumscription
- default logic
- nonmonotonic logic
- autoepistemic logic
- inheritance hierarchies
- closed world assumption and negation as failure
Other (as time permits; 5 weeks)
- generalized closed-world assumption
- unique-names hypothesis
- counterexample problem
- temporal projection
- deductive databases
- active logic
- deontic logic
- probabilistic approaches
- applications to natural language
- other applications to commonsense reasoning
- implementation issues

Course Text

One or more of the following may be used, varying slightly from semester to semester:

D. Etherington, Reasoning with Incomplete Information, Morgan Kaufmann, Research Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 1988.
M. Ginsberg (ed.), Readings in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann, 1987.
W. Marek and M. Trusczynski. Default Logic, Springer Verlag, 1994.
D. Gabbay et al, Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Oxford 1994.

Typical Grading and Workload

Substantial readings and in-class discussion
One or two exams
Class presentation