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Antonis Kakas and Rob MillerReasoning about Actions, Narratives and Ramification |
The article mentioned above has been submitted to the Electronic
Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and the present page
contains the review discussion. Click for
more explanations and for the webpage of the
authors: Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller.
Overview of interactionsQ1. Michael Thielscher (24.10):
Antonis and Rob, I have a question concerning the notion of initiation and termination points in case ramifications are involved. If my understanding of your Definition 14 is correct, then there seems to be a problem with undesired mutual justification. Take, as an example, the two r-propositions
Finding some least fixpoint, which you mention after the definition, seems therefore vital for the correctness of the definition itself. However, the corresponding operator must not have an interpretation as argument. So I would think that instead of defining the notions of "initiation and termination points for F in H relative to D " one should define "initiation and termination points for F relative to D ," that is, without reference to some H .
A1. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (30.10):
Hello Michael, Thanks for your comments about Definition 14 of initiation and termination points. You are of course right to say that the definition requires the least fixed point construction, so perhaps we should have made this explicit within the definition itself. We omitted this from the paper in an attempt not to overload the definition with too much formalism, but perhaps its omission is causing more rather than less confusion. (Hudson Turner emailed us a comment similar to yours a little while ago.) So yes, the initiation and termination points are defined by a least fixed point construction (along the lines we say after the definition). The version of the definition that makes this explicit is unfortunately a little too full of mathematical notation to write here in plain text or html format; please refer to the latex/postscript version of this message at [j-enrac-1-66]. You'll see that the operator corresponding to the least fixed point does indeed have an interpretation as argument. But there's no problem with this, because the interpretation is already fixed at the beginning of the definition. It's necessary to include this argument in order to deal with preconditions of c-propositions. For example, consider the following domain (with time as the naturals):
Q2. Tom Costello (28.10):
In your paper you have three types of proposition, h, t and c-propositions. In your definition of an interpretation, you give enough information to establish truth conditions for t-propositions. The following is the obvious truth condition for t-propositions. A t-proposition, F holds-at T , is true in an interpretation E , if E(F, T) = true . However, you do not seem to have enough information to give truth conditions for h or c-propositions. Consider the domain language with one time-point 0 and one fluent F and one action A . Then the domain description,
The domain description
For a logic to model distinct sets of propositions by the same structure is problematic for many reasons. As a general point, A type languages are not sufficiently formal in defining when a proposition in true in a model. This has led to errors like the above in A -type languages. Some papers have used a function from sequences of actions to sets of fluents, rather than a labeled transition function/relation from sets of fluents to sets of fluents, to give semantics to action languages. The former collapses domain descriptions that differ on causal propositions, while the latter does not. Giunchiglia, Kartha and Lifschitz are an example of the use of the latter. I know of no paper that explicitly gives truth conditions for all propositions in an A -type language. A2. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (30.10):
Hello Tom, Thanks for your comments and observations. Regarding your specific comments about the Language E , then you're right - from a formal point of view there is no concept of truth or falsity as regards h- and c-propositions. So, from the definitions, it doesn't even make sense to talk about "the set of true h-propositions". For your example, the semantics simply "disregards" the h-proposition A happens-at 0 , because the occurrence of A at 0 that this represents at the syntactic level has no effects. There's no problem with this from a formal point of view, but it does mean that E , and languages like it, are very restrictive. That's why they're perhaps best regarded as stepping-stones towards formalisations or axiomatisations written in fuller, general-purpose logics. (However, and as we hope we and others have illustrated, they do have a use in discussing and illustrating approaches to particular issues - in our case, to ramifications - in a relatively intuitive and uncluttered way, and also in proving properties of classes of logic programs.) This is where work such as that of Kartha (translating A into various versions of the Situation Calculus) is valuable. In the case of the Language A , Kartha's translations bring out the fact that there is an implicit completion of causal information ( A 's e-propositions) in A 's semantics. Much the same thing is true of h- and c-propositions in E . (This is why adding truth functions for h- and c-propositions in E models would be trivial but rather superfluous). We discussed this in more detail in our first paper on E (in the Journal of logic Programming). As we've said in both papers, it's our intention to explore these issues further by developing translations analogous to Kartha's for E . You might also be interested to look at the papers by Kristof Van Belleghem, Marc Deneker, and Daniele Theseider Dupre, who have developed a language ER similar in many respects to E , but more expressive and with a correspondingly more complex semantics (which includes truth conditions for the equivalent of h- and c-propositions). (We've described this briefly in Section 5 of our paper.) As regards your general point about " A type languages", it would be interesting to get some comments from " A type people" about this. Perhaps "not sufficiently expressive" is a better phrase than "not sufficiently formal". (On this general theme, Mikhail Soutchanski made another good point in the recent ENAI when he pointed out that it's much easier to combine theories of action written in classical logic with other commonsense theories, e.g. of space or shape, than if specialised logics are used.) C2-1. Alessandro Provetti (10.11):
Dear Antonis and Rob,
I'd like to comment on Tom's example about the role of h-statements
in
Assume that there are other fluents than
The latter yields the same models as far as the initial state is concerned,
but all of them sanction that
It appears to me that the equivalence of the two theories above under
You may want to comment on this in the paper or -possibly- proceed to work
on the entailment associated to Hope this helps. Ciao! Alessandro Provetti
C2-2. Tom Costello (11.11):
Dear Antonis and Rob, (and Alessandro)
While the languages
Consider the following domain description, stated in
These later approaches conflate models that intuitively differ.
I agree with Alessandro that Tom C2-3. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (12.11):
Hi Tom, You wrote:
As we said in our original answer to your question, it's trivial
to extend the semantics of the Language
The definition of a model is exactly as before (Definition 9), with the additional conditions:
But this
doesn't really add much insight; you just get that Rob and Tony C2-4. Tom Costello (13.11):
Dear Rob and Tony,
Your definition of truth for c-propositions seems very unintuitive to
me. I would think that if Your definition does not give this result. The reason I ask for truth conditions for your propositions is that I cannot understand what the intuitive consequences of a set of propositions should be, unless I understand what the propositions say. If the propositions are expressed in a standard logic, then I understand them using the definition of truth in a model. However, your propositions are not in a standard logic, and therefore, to understand what
Your paper introduces a new type of proposition,
I do not think truth conditions are a side point to the main theme of your paper. As you say, action languages are supposed to be "understandable and intuitive". Languages cannot be understood without semantics. Yours, Tom
C2-5. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (17.11):
Tom,
We think that perhaps we're in danger of going round in circles in this
discussion. As we've said in other answers, we've much sympathy for
your stance on the benefits of general purpose logics (and in particular
classical logic), and that's why we've stated on numerous occcasions
that languages such as
Again, it would be interesting to get some views from more people who
have developed Rob and Tony
C2-6. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (28.11):
Tom, In ENRAC 21.11, in the context of the general discussion on action description languages, you asked:
In the light of this remark, it now occurs to us that a possible
partial explanation of your difficulty in gaining an intuition about
the meaning of
To understand our intentions, it's better to think just in terms
of local cause and effect, i.e. to think of the r-proposition
We include "minimally" here to express our
feeling that it's not intuitive to include completely irrelevant
fluents in the set However, we retain sympathy for your general arguments about the need, ultimately, for theories in classical logic or similar, and for defining entailment in terms of truth functions (as we've effectively done for t-propositions). It is of course debatable whether such theories need to be centered around the notions of global states and state transitions. One's intuitions and preferences about this are probably coloured by one's experience. Rob and Tony Q3. Tom Costello (30.10):
A question on the choice of approach: Why didn't you write everything in classical logic?. Personally, I find it much more natural to consider classical logical languages than A -type languages. The enclosed postscript file is a translation of the proposed E language to a classical language, which I feel makes much clearer the advantages and disadvantages of the proposal. A3. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (30.10):
Hello Tom, -- We've no objection to using classical logic. Indeed, in both our E papers we've mentioned our intention to translate E into classical logic and other general-purpose formalisms, in order to gain the obvious benefits. (An obvious candidate as a target for this translation is something like the classical logic Event Calculus in [Miller & Shanahan 1996].) As you indicate in your question, different researchers will find different approaches more natural. We chose to initially express our ideas on ramification in this form because we found it relatively intuitive and uncluttered, and convenient for proving properties of logic programs that we want to use for various applications. As we've stated in our answer to your previous question and in our first paper on E , these specialised languages are perhaps best regarded as stepping-stones towards formalisations or axiomatisations written in fuller, general-purpose logics. It's great that you have in fact used E in exactly this way. Please publish! One point about your relations init and term in your classical logic translation. You say that you should take the "smallest relations ... that satisfy the above [axioms partially defining the relations]". But it turns out that this "smallest relation" idea is still not quite sufficient for eliminating the kind of anomalous models that Michael Thielscher was drawing attention to. So you really do need a least fixed point notion or equivalent somewhere in your axiomatisation, where the associated operator generates the least fixed point starting from a pair of empty sets (see our answer to Michael's question). Of course, another reason for using the specialised language approach was to illustrate that the Language A type methodology could be applied using ontologies other than that of the Situation Calculus. We're not sure if authors of Language A type papers would reply to your question in the same way, so it would be interesting to get some other responses from this community. Rob and Tony
Q4. Michael Gelfond (3.11):
Dear Tony and Rob. I am trying to understand the relationship between
your language
To do that I need some good intuitive understanding of the meaning of
statements of
The meaning of
The goal of
Can you (and do you want to) use My other questions are about your logic program. I do not fully understand your definition of initiation point. Do I understand correctly that it should be changed? If so, what happens with the correctness of logic program? It may be useful to use some semantics of logic program instead of using SLDNF directly. SLDNF can give some results which are correct w.r.t. your specification even though the program is semantically meaningless (Say, its Clark's completion is too weak or inconsistent, or it does not have stable model, etc.) If you prove that the program is semantically correct one will be able to use this result directly even if your program is run on, say, XDB or SLG (which checks for some loops) and not under Prolog.
Finally, more comments on LP4 will help. I find
comments like A4. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (5.11):
Hello Michael, thanks for your question (several questions in fact!). Here are replies to each of your points in turn. You wrote:
This is indeed an interesting question, and one that we tried to
address to some extent in our first (JLP) paper on You wrote:
Yes, that seems correct. You wrote:
Yes, the meaning of statements such as
Our intuition about
Situation Calculus terms such as
Now, in order to simulate Situation-Calculus-like hypothetical
reasoning in
Like the Situation Calculus and the Language
It is straightforward to extend this approach to partially deal
with hypothetical reasoning about concurrent actions, by adapting
Chitta Baral's and your ideas. Our structure of time would include
sequences of sets of action symbols, e.g. You wrote:
You wrote:
But (at the risk of re-opening an old and seemingly unstoppable
debate), at least for planning our first choice would be to use
abduction with a linear time structure rather than deduction with
a hypothetical branching time structure. Again, there are some
remarks about this in the original (JLP) paper on the Language
You wrote:
You wrote:
You wrote:
Rob and Tony.
Q5. François Lévy (4.3):
Dear Antonis and Rob Here are two late questions about your paper. First, according to your view of ramifications, fluents can be initiated/terminated in two ways: either when an event occurs, or due to changing fluents in a constraint. The formal difference is that a fluent changing its value is not by itself an event. Do you consider it to rely on an ontological difference -- i.e. in the process of modeling the real world, two kinds of objects of different nature have to be considered : events on the one side, (instantly) changing fluents on the other one. Or do you consider both similar, and make a difference on a purely technical ground (trigered events don't work to render this if the time line is dense)?
Second, as far as I understand, your predicate `Whenever' embeds both a
domain constraint
and a notion of influence, in Michael Thielscher's sense in his AI97
paper. The domain constraint
is what you call the static view -- i.e. `Whenever' being replaced by a
material implication.
The influence information is: in the formula Best Regards François
A5. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (31.3):
Dear Francois, Thanks again for your questions.
So the choice of whether to use r-propositions as well as c-propositions when modelling a particular domain is partly pragmatic. "-Switch2 whenever {Relay}" can be read as "all the events which initiate Relay also terminate Switch2". The use of this r-proposition thus enables us to avoid writing a whole series of terminates propositions for Switch2 corresponding to each of the initiates propositions for Relay.
But there are other advantages in using r-propositions, as identified in
the paper. Not least, it helps with succinctly and correctly capturing
the effects of concurrent events. For example, the concurrent 'stuffy room'
example in the paper is difficult to describe in
would be represented with the r-propositions
Alive whenever {-Dead}
-Alive whenever {Dead}
Dead whenever {-Alive}
-Dead whenever {Alive}
However, we feel that it would be difficult to establish a formal correspondence between our approach to ramifications and Michael Thielscher's, for the reasons outlined in our discussion section. There seems to be a difference in the approaches in that Michael's effect propagation is 'approximately' instantaneous, whereas ours is 'truly' instantaneous (this is not to say that either is right or wrong - just that they're modelling slightly different concepts). This difference manifests itself in domains such as Michael's 'light detector' example (see Section 5 of his AI97 paper). We'd model the introduction of the detector with the single r-proposition
Detect whenever {Light}
But we wouldn't get the same 'non-deterministic' behaviour of the detector that Michael gets - i.e. we wouldn't get the model in which the detector is activated when Switch1 is connected. Indeed, this model wouldn't make sense in a narrative-based formalism with explicit time - the detector would have been activated even though there was no time-point at which the light was on. (Michael expands on the theme of 'approximately' verses 'truly' instantaneous effects in his related paper in the proceedings of Common Sense '98.) Tony and Rob.
Q6. Anonymous Reviewer 2 (23.4):
The paper by Baral, Gelfond and Provetti published recently in JLP
describes an A6. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
Yes, this paper is clearly related to the themes of both
the present article and our previous paper on the Language
Q7. Anonymous Reviewer 3 (23.4):
Your paper makes the following contributions:
Both these contributions are welcome. The ramification problem
is an important problem in temporal reasoning which is
still not well understood. Studying the problem in the context
of a unified temporal language has the potential to shed light
on the connection between the ramification problem and other problems
in temporal reasoning, though see below for further comments.
The translation between First, and most saliently, the paper does not explain why your approach solves the ramification problem. (Indeed, you don't explain why the approach solves the frame problem either, though that presumably was the job of the 1997 JLP paper.) It would be helpful to give some intuition of why this central problem in temporal reasoning arises, what other approaches have been suggested, how these approaches succeed and fail, what this approach provides, intuitively, in the way of a solution to the ramification problem, and how this approach compares to other approaches. You do the last (comparing your approach to other approaches) briefly, in the beginning of section 5, but this treatment is too cursory and raises almost more questions than it answers. For example, in comparing your approach to those of Thielscher, McCain and Turner, and Lin, you aruge that their approach is essentially a causal-based approach, because the effect of action occurrences cannot be propagated backward through r(amification)-propositions. To this reviewer, this fact hardly seems to be the characteristic fact of causal theories. A deeper analysis of what makes a causal theory, whether sets of axioms in E can be considered causal theories, and how causal approaches can be used to solve the ramification problem, would be helpful here. Also very desirable would be a discussion of how solutions to the ramification problem interact with solutions to the frame problem. In particular, there is often a duality between the two problems, in that the frame problem is often seen as a mainly representational problem, whose solutions may worsen things from the computational point of view, and the ramification problem is often seen as mainly a computational problem, whose solutions may worsen things from the representational point of view. How do your two solutions interact? A discussion would be useful. A7. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
We're not sure if we would go as far as to state that we have "solved the ramification problem." Like the frame problem, not everyone agrees exactly what this problem is. The analysis in our paper is that
The current state of A.I. doesn't unfortunately permit a definitive statement of what makes a causal theory -- it seems to mean different things to different sub-communities (as witnessed in the recent AAAI Spring Symposium on Causality in Reasoning About Actions). Thielscher and others merely make a technical distinction between "causal-based" and "categorisation-based" contributions to the ramification problem. Our contribution is "causal-based" in this limited technical sense in that it doesn't categorise fluents, but does have a unidirectional ("whenever") "connective". But we accept that perhaps it's not so healthy to hijack the word "causal" for a rather specialised technical use in this way. We reject the view that the frame problem is a mainly representational problem and the ramification problem is mainly a computational problem. We see both problems as having representational and computational aspects.
We accept that more in depth analyses are needed of the
relationships between formalisms for resoning about actions
in general, and approaches to ramifications in particular.
Ultimately, the best way to do this is by providing
translation methods and showing that these are "sound"
and/or "complete" for well defined classes of domains.
We haven't had time to do this yet, but it's on our agenda
of future work on the Language Q8. Anonymous Reviewer 3 (23.4):
The examples in the paper would be more helpful if they were expanded more. Examples:
A8. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
The domain description on page 6 was: CloseWindow initiates WindowClosed
CloseVent initiates VentClosed
OpenWindow terminates WindowClosed
OpenVent terminates VentClosed
CloseWindow initiates Stuffy when {VentClosed}
CloseVent initiates Stuffy when {WindowClosed}
OpenWindow terminates Stuffy
OpenVent terminates Stuffy
Let H be the interpretation for this domain defined as
follows:
H(WindowClosed,t) = true, for all t
H(VentClosed,t) = true, for all t
H(Stuffy,t) = false, for all t
Since there are no h-propositions in this domain, by
Definition 8 there are no initiation points or termination
points w.r.t. H. Hence H conditions 1-4 of Definition 9,
and so is a model of the domain.
Re the "stuffy room" example on page 8, this is of course the classic illustration of why naive minimisation of change doesn't work when domain constraints are included in a domain. For example, if a situation calculus theory includes the constraint
The reviewer also wrote:
Q9. Anonymous Reviewer 3 (23.4):
The unique contributions of this paper over the JLP paper are not
so explicitly stated, namely, the introduction for the "whenever"
construct into A9. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
You summarised the contributions very well at the top of your report:
Q10. Anonymous Reviewer 3 (23.4):
The writing is in general clear, understandable, and straightforward, but there are several places which were unclear, or in which an additional English gloss would be helpful. Specifically:
A10. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
The partial order ranges over all items in the set of
time-points
As we stated in our discussion with Tom Costello (interactions C2-6), the r-proposition "L whenever C" can be read as "C is a minimally sufficient cause for L". So, to quote from the paper, "at every time-point that C holds, L holds, and hence every action occurrence that brings about C also brings about L". So, "in order to find time-points at which the fluent literal L is established via the r-proposition `L whenever C', we need to look for time-points at which one or more of the conditions in C become established, and at which the remaining conditions are already and continue to be satisfied (up to some time-point beyond the point in question)." Clauses 2 of both Definition 14 and of Proposition 2 are mathematical articulations of this last statement.
Q11. Anonymous Reviewer 3 (23.4):
The online ETAI discussions highlighted a number of interesting points,
including the issue of using a special purpose language A11. Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller (3.5):
The revised version of our paper (now available via the ETAI web pages) includes some extra remarks relating to various points raised in the ETAI interactions. We also very much hope that the paper will be read in conjunction with the online discussion. Background: Review Protocol Pages and the ETAIThis Review Protocol Page (RPP) is a part of the webpage structure for the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, or ETAI. The ETAI is an electronic journal that uses the Internet medium not merely for distributing the articles, but also for a novel, two-stage review procedure. The first review phase is open and allows the peer community to ask questions to the author and to create a discussion about the contribution. The second phase - called refereeing in the ETAI - is like conventional journal refereeing except that the major part of the required feedback is supposed to have occurred already in the first, review phase.The referees make a recommendation whether the article is to be accepted or declined, as usual. The article and the discussion remain on-line regardless of whether the article was accepted or not. Additional questions and discussion after the acceptance decision are welcomed. The Review Protocol Page is used as a working structure for the entire reviewing process. During the first (review) phase it accumulates the successive debate contributions. If the referees make specific comments about the article in the refereeing phase, then those comments are posted on the RPP as well, but without indicating the identity of the referee. (In many cases the referees may return simply an " accept" or " decline" recommendation, namely if sufficient feedback has been obtained already in the review phase).
This debate is moderated by Erik Sandewall. |