Ordered seminormal default theories and their extensions
Jianhua Chen · Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence · 1991
The concept of extension plays an important role in default logic. The notion of an ordered seminormal default theory has been introduced (Etherington 1987) to characterize a class of seminormal default theories which have extensions. However, the original definition has a drawback because of its dependence on specific representations of the default theory. We introduce the ‘canonical representation’ of a default theory and redefine the orderedness of a default theory based on its canonical representation. We show that under the new definition, the orderedness of a default theory Δ = (W,D) is intrinsic to the theory itself, independent of the specific representations of W and D. We present a modification of the algorithm in Etherington (1987) for computing extensions of a default theory. More importantly, we prove the conjecture (Etherington 1987) that a modified version of the algorithm in Etherington (1987) converges for general ordered, finite seminormal default theories, while the original algorithm was proven (Etherington 1987) to converge for ordered, finite network default theories which form a proper subset of the theories considered in this paper.