Abduction in Model Generative Reasoning
Roger T. Hartley, Michael J. Coombs · 1999
Most of the abductive mechanisms in the literature are based on formalizations in logical inference. This is true of the model-based approaches of Poole and Shanahan, the resolution approaches of Stickel and Levesque and the work of Charniak and Reiter. This paper shows how a related formalization can be assembled from representations based on Sowa’s conceptual graphs and the appropriate (binary) operations on these graphs. The equivalence of the method to logical abduction is noted. Abduction is only useful in a proper pragmatic setting of problem solving. Examples are given to show how the mechanism operates, and algorithms are presented, suitable for complexity analysis.