Showing papers on "Commonsense reasoning published in 1981"

Qualitative reasoning about physical processes

Abstract: Common sense reasoning about the physical world must include an understanding of physical processes and the changes they cause. For example, heating a liquid causes its temperature to rise and if continued long enough may cause it to boil. A style of analysis is presented that combines deKleer's Incremental Qualitative analysis wjth the Quantity Space idea from Naive Physics to reason about the effects of physical processes and their limits. The analysis is demonstrated on an example with practical importance, and further possibilities for applications are discussed.

Automatic Deduction for Commonsense Reasoning: An Overview

Abstract: : Knowing how to enable computers to draw conclusions automatically from bodies of facts has long been recognized as a central problem in artificial intelligence (AT) research Any attempt to address this problem requires choosing an application (or type of application), a representation for bodies of facts, and methods for deriving conclusions This article provides an overview of the issues involved in drawing conclusions by means of deductive inference from bodies of commonsense knowledge represented by logical formulas The authors first briefly review the history of this enterprise: its origins, its fall into disfavor, and its recent revival They show why applications involving certain types of incomplete information resist solution by other techniques, and how supplying domain-specific control information seems to offer a solution to the difficulties that previously led to disillusionment with automatic deduction Finally, they discuss the relationship of automatic deduction to the new field of "logic programming" and then survey some of the issues that arise in extending automatic-deduction techniques to nonstandard logic