Temporal Languages for Epistemic Programs

This paper adds temporal logic to public announcement logic (PAL) and dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). By adding a previous-time operator to PAL, we express in the language statements concerning the muddy children puzzle and sum and product. We also express a true statement that an agent’s beliefs about another agent’s knowledge flipped twice, and use a sound proof system to prove this statement. Adding a next-time operator to PAL, we provide formulas that express that belief revision does not take place in PAL. We also discuss relationships between announcements and the new knowledge agents thus acquire; such relationships are related to learning and to Fitch’s paradox. We also show how inverse programs and hybrid logic each can be used to help determine whether or not an arbitrary structure represents the play of a game. We then add a past-time operator to DEL, and discuss the importance of adding yet another component to the language in order to prove completeness.     

A Role Based Model for the Normative Specification of Organized Collective Agency and Agents Interaction

In this article we propose a role based model for the specification of organized collective agency, based on the legal concept of artificial person and on the normative perspective of organizational systems. We focus on the analysis of groups of agents (humans or not) that want to act collectively in a (more or less) permanent basis, and in a stable and organized way, as it is the typical case of organizations. We argue that in those cases such groups of agents should give rise to a new agent, that we call of institutionalized agent, with its own identity, whose structure is essentially defined through the characterization of a set of roles and whose behavior is determined by the acts of the agents that play such roles. We also present a deontic and action modal logic that captures the concept of acting in a role and relates it with the deontic notions of obligation, permission and prohibition. This logic is used in the formal specification of institutionalized agents and of societies of agents and in the rigorous analysis of them. We pay particular attention to the interaction between agents through contracts or other normative relations. A high level specification language is also suggested.     

A non-minimal but very weak axiomatization of common belief

The paper introduces a modal logic system of individual and common belief which is shown to be sound and complete with respect to a version of Neighbourhood semantics. This axiomatization of common belief is the weakest of all those currently available: it dispenses with even the Monotonicity rule of individual belief. It is non-minimal in that it does not use just the Equivalence rule but the conjunction of the latter with the specially devised rule of C-Restricted Monotonicity.     

一种求解认知难题的模型检测方法

用公告逻辑建模并求解和与积认知难题.提出一种动态认知模型,将环境认知模型与公告导致的认知模型线性组合,从而在时态认知逻辑模型检测技术中扩展支持公告逻辑的建模与验证.该模型检测方法不仅可以用于搜索认知难题的所有解,而且可以验证相关的时态认知性质,这一特性是当前认知逻辑模型检测工具MCK、MCMAS和DEMO不能完全支持的.作者采用OBDD开发了相关的符号化模型检测工具MCTK并对和与积难题进行建模和验证,实验结果说明了文中方法的正确性和高效性.     

Logics of communication and change

Current dynamic epistemic logics for analyzing effects of informational events often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added for groups of agents. Still, postconditions involving common knowledge are essential to successful multi-agent communication. We propose new systems that extend the epistemic base language with a new notion of ‘relativized common knowledge’, in such a way that the resulting full dynamic logic of information flow allows for a compositional analysis of all epistemic postconditions via perspicuous ‘reduction axioms’. We also show how such systems can deal with factual alteration, rather than just information change, making them cover a much wider range of realistic events. After a warm-up stage of analyzing logics for public announcements, our main technical results are expressivity and completeness theorems for a much richer logic that we call LCC. This is a dynamic epistemic logic whose static base is propositional dynamic logic (PDL), interpreted epistemically. This system is capable of expressing all model-shifting operations with finite action models, while providing a compositional analysis for a wide range of informational events. This makes LCC a serious candidate for a standard in dynamic epistemic logic, as we illustrate by analyzing some complex communication scenarios, including sending successive emails with both ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ lines, and other private announcements to subgroups. Our proofs involve standard modal techniques, combined with a new application of Kleene’s Theorem on finite automata, as well as new Ehrenfeucht games of model comparison.     

The dynamics of default reasoning

In this paper we study default reasoning from a dynamic, agent-oriented, semantics-based point of view. In a formal framework used to specify and to reason about rational agents, we introduce actions that model the (attempted) jumping to conclusions that is a fundamental part of reasoning by default. Application of such an action consists of three parts. First it is checked whether the formula that the agent tries to jump to is a default, thereafter it is checked whether the default formula can consistently be incorporated by the agent, and if this is the case the formula is included in the agent's beliefs. As for all actions in our framework, we define the ability and opportunity of agents to apply these actions, and the states of affairs following application. To formalise formulae being defaults, we introduce the modality of common possibility. This modality is related to, but not reducible to, the notions of common knowledge and ‘everybody knows’-knowledge. To model the qualitative difference that exists between hard, factual knowledge and beliefs derived by default, we employ different modalities to represent these concepts, thus combining knowledge, beliefs, and defaults in one framework. Based on the concepts used to model the default reasoning of agents, we look into the dynamics of the supernormal fragment of default logic. We show in particular that by sequences of jumps to conclusions agents can end up with extensions in the sense of default logic of their belief.     

Epistemic Logic for Rule-Based Agents

The logical omniscience problem, whereby standard models of epistemic logic treat an agent as believing all consequences of its beliefs and knowing whatever follows from what else it knows, has received plenty of attention in the literature. But many attempted solutions focus on a fairly narrow specification of the problem: avoiding the closure of belief or knowledge, rather than showing how the proposed logic is of philosophical interest or of use in computer science or artificial intelligence. Sentential epistemic logics, as opposed to traditional possible worlds approaches, do not suffer from the problems of logical omniscience but are often thought to lack interesting epistemic properties. In this paper, I focus on the case of rule-based agents, which play a key role in contemporary AI research but have been neglected in the logical literature. I develop a framework for modelling monotonic, nonmonotonic and introspective rule-based reasoners which have limited cognitive resources and prove that the resulting models have a number of interesting properties. An axiomatization of the resulting logic is given, together with completeness, decidability and complexity results.     

Common knowledge does not have the Beth property

Common knowledge is an essential notion for coordination among agents. We show that the logic of common knowledge does not have the Beth property and thus it also lacks interpolation. The proof we present is a variant of Maksimova's proof that temporal logics with ‘the next’ do not have the Beth property. Our result also provides an explanation why it is so difficult to find ‘nice’ deductive systems for common knowledge.     

A Logic with Relative Knowledge Operators

We study a knowledge logic that assumes that to each set of agents, an indiscernibility relation is associated and the agents decide the membership of objects or states up to this indiscernibility relation. Its language contains a family of relative knowledge operators. We prove the decidability of the satisfiability problem, we show its EXPTIME-completeness and as a side-effect, we define a complete Hilbert-style axiomatization.     

Iterative belief revision in extended logic programming

Extended logic programming augments conventional logic programming with both default and explicit negation. Several semantics for extended logic programs have been proposed that extend the well-founded semantics for logic programs with default negation (called normal programs). We show that two of these extended semantics are intractable; both Dung's grounded argumentation semantics and the well-founded semantics of Alferes et al. are NP-hard. Nevertheless, we also show that these two semantics have a common core, a more restricted form of the grounded semantics, which is tractable and can be computed iteratively in quadratic time. Moreover, this semantics is a representative of a rich class of tractable semantics based on a notion of iterative belief revision.     

Towards an Awareness-Based Semantics for Security Protocol Analysis

We report on work-in-progress on a new semantics for analyzing security protocols that combines complementary features of security logics and inductive methods. We use awareness to model the agents' resource-bounded reasoning and, in doing so, capture a more appropriate notion of belief than those usually considered in security logics. We also address the problem of modeling interleaved protocol executions, adapting ideas from inductive methods for protocol verification. The result is an intuitive, but expressive, doxastic logic for formalizing and reasoning about attacks. As a case study, we use awareness to characterize, and demonstrate the existence of, a man-in-the-middle attack upon the Needham-Schroeder Public Key protocol. This is, to our knowledge, not only the first doxastic analysis of this attack but also the first practical application of an awareness logic. Even though defining the awareness sets of the agents, a task that is left unspecified in formal works on awareness logics, turns out to be surprisingly subtle, initial results suggest that our approach is promising for modeling, verifying and reasoning about security protocols and their properties.     

A Thorough Axiomatization of a Principle of Conditional Preservation in Belief Revision

Although the crucial role of if-then-conditionals for the dynamics of knowledge has been known for several decades, they do not seem to fit well in the framework of classical belief revision theory. In particular, the propositional paradigm of minimal change guiding the AGM-postulates of belief revision proved to be inadequate for preserving conditional beliefs under revision. In this paper, we present a thorough axiomatization of a principle of conditional preservation in a very general framework, considering the revision of epistemic states by sets of conditionals. This axiomatization is based on a nonstandard approach to conditionals, which focuses on their dynamic aspects, and uses the newly introduced notion of conditional valuation functions as representations of epistemic states. In this way, probabilistic revision as well as possibilistic revision and the revision of ranking functions can all be dealt with within one framework. Moreover, we show that our approach can also be applied in a merely qualitative environment, extending AGM-style revision to properly handling conditional beliefs.     

A logic to reason about likelihood

We present a logic LL which uses a modal operator L to help capture the notion of being likely. Despite the fact that likelihood is not assigned quantitative values through probabilities, LL captures many of the properties of likelihood in an intuitively appealing way. We give a possible-worlds style semantics to LL, and, using standard techniques of modal logic, we give a complete axiomatization for LL and show that satisfiability of LL formulas can be decided in exponential time. We discuss how the logic might be used in areas such as medical diagnosis, where decision making in the face of uncertainties is crucial. We conclude by using LL to give a formal proof of correctness of some aspects of a protocol for exchanging secrets.     

Uniform semantic treatment of default and autoepistemic logics

We revisit the issue of epistemological and semantic foundations for autoepistemic and default logics, two leading formalisms in nonmonotonic reasoning. We develop a general semantic approach to autoepistemic and default logics that is based on the notion of a belief pair and that exploits the lattice structure of the collection of all belief pairs. For each logic, we introduce a monotone operator on the lattice of belief pairs. We then show that a whole family of semantics can be defined in a systematic and principled way in terms of fixpoints of this operator (or as fixpoints of certain closely related operators). Our approach elucidates fundamental constructive principles in which agents form their belief sets, and leads to approximation semantics for autoepistemic and default logics. It also allows us to establish a precise one-to-one correspondence between the family of semantics for default logic and the family of semantics for autoepistemic logic. The correspondence exploits the modal interpretation of a default proposed by Konolige. Our results establish conclusively that default logic can be viewed as a fragment of autoepistemic logic, a result that has been long anticipated. At the same time, they explain the source of the difficulty to formally relate the semantics of default extensions by Reiter and autoepistemic expansions by Moore. These two semantics occupy different locations in the corresponding families of semantics for default and autoepistemic logics.     

Reasoning about Information Change

In this paper we introduce Dynamic Epistemic Logic, which is alogic for reasoning about information change in a multi-agent system. Theinformation structures we use are based on non-well-founded sets, and canbe conceived as bisimulation classes of Kripke models. On these structures,we define a notion of information change that is inspired by UpdateSemantics (Veltman, 1996). We give a sound and complete axiomatization ofthe resulting logic, and we discuss applications to the puzzle of the dirtychildren, and to knowledge programs.     

Reasoning tractably about explicit belief: A model‐theoretic approach

Existing epistemic logics such as the logic of implicit and explicit belief and the logic of awareness adopt a deductive‐theoretic approach for characterizing belief. In this approach, an agent represents the state of the world with a conjunction of axioms in its knowledge base (KB) and evaluates queries by trying to prove or disprove that they follow from KB. This paper presents a multivalued epistemic logic (MEL) that allows agents to reason both deductively and model theoretically about implicit and explicit belief. By characterizing an agent's KB with a class of finite models, the set of formulas that an agent believes can be determined by checking their validity in all these models. This rests on the fact that MEL has a complete axiomatization (sentences that are true in all these models will also be provable). In this paper, the soundness, completeness, and decidability of MEL are proven. Furthermore, a polynomial time model‐checking algorithm for determining the satisfiability of a sentence at a particular state in a given model of MEL is also presented. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The relationship between knowledge,belief, and certainty

We consider the relation between knowledge and certainty, where a fact isknown if it is true at all worlds an agent considers possible and iscertain if it holds with probability 1. We identify certainty with belief, interpreted probabilistically. We show that if we assume one fixed probability assignment, then the logic KD45, which has been identified as perhaps the most appropriate for belief, provides a complete axiomatization for reasoning about certainty. Just as an agent may believe a fact although is false, he may be certain that a fact is true although is false. However, it is easy to see that an agent can have such false (probabilistic) beliefs only at a set of worlds of probability 0. If we restrict attention to structures where all worlds have positive probability, then S5 provides a complete axiomatization. If we consider a more general setting, where there might be a different probability assignment at each world, then by placing appropriate conditions on thesupport of the probability function (the set of worlds which have non-zero probability), we can capture many other well-known modal logics, such as T and S4. Finally, we considerMiller's principle, a well-known principle relating higher-order probabilities to lower-order probabilities, and show that in a precise sense KD45 characterizes certainty in those structures satisfying Miller's principle.     

Believing change and changing belief

We present a first-order logic of time, chance, and probability that is capable of expressing the four types of higher-order probability sentences relating subjective probability and objective chance at different times. We define a causal notion of objective chance and show how it can be used in conjunction with subjective probability to distinguish between causal and evidential correlation by distinguishing between conditions, events, and actions that: 1) influence the agent's belief in chance; and 2) the agent believes to influence chance. Furthermore, the semantics of the logic captures some common sense inferences concerning objective chance and causality. We show that an agent's subjective probability is the expected value of its beliefs concerning objective chance. We also prove that an agent using this representation believes with certainty that the past cannot be causally influenced     

Belief,awareness, and limited reasoning

Several new logics for belief and knowledge are introduced and studied, all of which have the property that agents are not logically omniscient. In particular, in these logics, the set of beliefs of an agent does not necessarily contain all valid formulas. Thus, these logics are more suitable than traditional logics for modelling beliefs of humans (or machines) with limited reasoning capabilities. Our first logic is essentially an extension of Levesque's logic of implicit and explicit belief, where we extend to allow multiple agents and higher-level belief (i.e., beliefs about beliefs). Our second logic deals explicitly with “awareness,” where, roughly speaking, it is necessary to be aware of a concept before one can have beliefs about it. Our third logic gives a model of “local reasoning,” where an agent is viewed as a “society of minds,” each with its own cluster of beliefs, which may contradict each other.     

基于深层注意力的LSTM的特定主题情感分析

目前特定主题情感分析任务中,传统的基于注意力的深度学习模型缺乏对主题特征和情感信息的有效关注。针对该问题,构建了融合主题特征的深层注意力的LSTM模型（deeper attention LSTM with aspect embedding,AE-DATT-LSTM）,通过共享权重的双向LSTM将主题词向量和文本词向量进行训练,得到主题特征和文本特征进行特征融合,经过深层注意力机制的处理,由分类器得到相应主题的情感分类结果。在SemEval-2014 Task4和SemEval-2017 Task4数据集上的实验结果表明,该方法在特定主题情感分析任务中,较之前基于注意力的情感分析模型在准确率和稳定性上有了进一步的提高。主题特征和深层注意力机制的引入,对于基于特定主题的情感分类任务具有重要的意义,为舆情分析、问答系统和文本推理等领域提供了方法的支持。