Specification and Evaluation of Preferences for Planning under Uncertainty
Sek-Wah Tan, Judea Pearl · 1994
This paper describes framework for specifying behavior in terms of preference sentences of the form to --a if3, to be interpreted as a is preferred to -~a when all else is fixed in any 3 world. We demonstrate how such preference sentences, together with normality defaults, may be used as constraints on admissible preference-ranking of worlds and how they allow reasoning agent to evaluate queries of the form would you prefer al over or2 given ¢ where al and ~r2 could be either action sequences or observational propositions. We also prove that by extending the syntax to allow for importance-rating of preference sentences, we obtain language that is powerful enough to represent all possible preferences among worlds.