Craig Boutilier
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, CANADA, V6T 1Z4
email: cebly@cs.ubc.ca
Abstract
The Katsuno and Mendelzon (KM) theory of belief update has been proposed
as a reasonable model for revising beliefs about a changing
world. However, the semantics of update relies on information
which is not readily available. We describe an alternative
semantical view of update in which observations are incorporated
into a belief set by: a) explaining the observation in terms
of a set of plausible events that might have caused that observation;
and b) predicting further consequences of those explanations.
We also allow the possibility of conditional explanations.
We show that this picture naturally induces an update operator
conforming to the KM postulates
under certain assumptions. However, we argue that these assumptions
are not always reasonable, and they restrict our ability to integrate
update with other forms of revision when reasoning about action.
(To appear, Artificial Intelligence, 1995)
Return to List of Papers