The Automation of Reasoning with Incomplete Information

Book excerpt: Reasoning with incomplete information constitutes a major challenge for any intelligent system. In fact, we expect such systems not to become paralyzed by missing information but rather to arrive at plausible results by bridging the gaps in the information available. A versatile way of reasoning in the absence of information is to reason by default. This book aims at providing formal and practical means for automating reasoning with incomplete information by starting from the approach taken by the framework of default logic. For this endeavor, a bridge is spanned between formal semantics, over systems for default reasoning, to efficient implementation.