IT Depertement, Office 306
University M’hamed Bougara, Independence Avenue,
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In this thesis, we present results on the extension of the existing methods for reasoning with totally ordered belief bases to the partially ordered case. The idea is to reason from logical bases equipped with a partial order expressing relative certainty and to construct a partially ordered deductive closure. The difficult part lies in the fact that equivalent definitions in the totally ordered case are no longer equivalent in the partially ordered case. At the syntactic level we can either use a language expressing pairs of related formulas and axioms describing the properties of the ordering, or use formulas with partially ordered symbolic weights attached to them in the spirit of possibilistic logic. A possible semantics consists in assuming that the partial order on formulas stems from a partial order on interpretations. It requires the capability of inducing a partial order on subsets of a set from a partial order on its elements so as to extend possibility theory functions. Among different possible definitions of induced partial order relations, we select the one generalizing necessity orderings (closely related to epistemic entrenchments). We study such a semantic approach inspired from possibilistic logic, and show its limitations when relying on a unique partial order on interpretations. We propose a more general sound and complete approach to relative certainty, inspired by conditional modal logics, in order to get a partial order on the whole propositional language. Some links between our approach and several inference systems, namely conditional logic, modal epistemic logic and non-monotonic preferential inference are established. Possibilistic logic with partially ordered symbolic weights proposed by Benferhat and Prade is also revisited and we continue the study by proving a completeness result. A comparison with the relative certainty approach is made via mutual translations. We compare this approach with the relative certainty approach.We study the question of the translation of a partially ordered base into a symbolic possibilistic base and vice versa. The results for this translation highlight different assumptions underlying the two logics. We also offer steps toward implementation tools for the inference of relative certainty and for the symbolic possibilistic system.
