Special issue of IJAR on Defeasible and Ampliative Reasoning

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Call for Papers:
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Special Issue of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning on
              "Defeasible and Ampliative Reasoning"
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Classical reasoning is not flexible enough when directly applied to the formalization of certain nuances of decision making as done by humans. These involve different kinds of reasoning such as reasoning with uncertainty, exceptions, similarity, vagueness, incomplete or contradictory information and many others.

It turns out that everyday reasoning usually shows the two salient intertwined aspects below:

* Ampliative aspect: augmenting the underlying reasoning by allowing more conclusions. In practical contexts, this amounts to the ability to make inferences that venture beyond the scope of the premises, somehow in an unsound but justifiable way. Prominent examples are (i) default reasoning: jumping to conclusions deemed as plausible 'by default', i.e., in the absence of information to the contrary, like applying negation as failure or adopting the closed-world assumption; (ii) inductive and abductive reasoning: taking chances in drawing conclusions that implicitly call for further scrutiny or tests by empirical observations, like in making inductive hypotheses in scientific theories or finding abductive explanations in forensics, and (iii) analogical reasoning: extrapolating from very few examples (in the worst case only one) on the basis of observable similarities or dissimilarities.

* Defeasible aspect: curtailing the underlying reasoning by either disregarding or disallowing some conclusions that somehow ought not to be sanctioned. In practice, this amounts to the ability to backtrack one's conclusions or to admit exceptions in reasoning. Some examples of this are (i) retractive reasoning: withdrawing conclusions that have already been derived, like in belief contraction or in negotiation, and (ii) preemptive reasoning: preventing or blocking the inference of some conclusions by disallowing their derivation in the first place, like in dealing with exceptional cases in multiple inheritance networks and in regulatory systems.

Several efforts have been put into the study and definition of formalisms within which the aforementioned aspects of everyday reasoning could adequately be captured at different levels. Despite the progress that has been achieved, a large avenue remains open for exploration. Indeed, the literature on non-monotonic reasoning has focused almost exclusively on defeasibility of argument forms, whereas belief revision paradigms are restricted to an underlying classical (Tarskian) consequence relation. Moreover, even if some of the issues related to uncertainty in reasoning have been studied using probabilistic approaches and statistical methods, their integration with qualitative frameworks remain a challenge. Finally, well-established approaches are largely based on propositional languages (poor expressiveness) or haunted by the undecidability of full first-order logic. Modern applications require formalisms with a good balance between expressive power and computational complexity in order to be also considered as good candidates for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI).

This special issue aims at bringing together work on defeasible and ampliative reasoning from the perspective of artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, philosophy and related disciplines in a multi-disciplinary way, thereby consolidating the mission of the DARe workshop series.

-- Topics of interest --

Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to defeasible and ampliative reasoning and that include but are not limited to:

- Abductive and inductive reasoning
- Explanation finding, diagnosis and causal reasoning
- Inconsistency handling and exception-tolerant reasoning
- Decision-making under uncertainty and incomplete information
- Default reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning, non-monotonic logics, conditional logics
- Specific instances and variations of ampliative and defeasible reasoning
- Probabilistic and statistical approaches to reasoning
- Vagueness, rough sets, granularity and fuzzy-logics
- Philosophical foundations of defeasibility
- Empirical studies of reasoning
- Relationship with cognition and language
- Contextual reasoning
- Preference-based reasoning
- Analogical reasoning
- Similarity-based reasoning
- Belief dynamics and merging
- Argumentation theory, negotiation and conflict resolution
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Defeasible normative systems
- Reasoning about actions and change
- Reasoning about knowledge and belief, epistemic and doxastic logics
- Ampliative and defeasible temporal and spatial reasoning
- Computational aspects of reasoning with uncertainty
- Implementations and systems
- Applications of uncertainty in reasoning

-- How to submit --

The submission url is: http://www.evise.com/evise/jrnl/IJA

When submitting your manuscript, please select “VSI:DARe special issue” as the article type.

Check the “Help” link on the above url for instructions.

If you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact us at dare.to.contact.us@gmail.com

-- Important Dates --

- Submission deadline: 15 February 2018
- Notification: 1 November 2018
- Publication date: 1 January 2019

-- Guest editors --

- Richard Booth, Cardiff University, UK
- Giovanni Casini, University of Luxembourg
- Szymon Klarman, Semantic Integration Ltd., UK
- Gilles Richard, Université Paul Sabatier, France
- Ivan Varzinczak, CRIL, Univ. Artois & CNRS, France

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Ivan Varzinczak
CRIL, Univ. Artois & CNRS, France
http://member.acm.org/~ijv <http://member.acm.org/~ijv>