Call for papers

Workshop Description and Aims

Classical reasoning is not flexible enough when directly applied to the formalization of certain nuances of human quotidian decision making. 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 or haunted by the undecidability of full first-order logic. Modern applications require formalisms with a good balance between expressive power and computational complexity.

DARe aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from core areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, philosophy and related disciplines to discuss these kinds of problems and relevant results in a multi-disciplinary forum. The goal of the workshop is to present latest research developments, to discuss current directions in the field, and to collect first-hand feedback from the community.

Scope of the Workshop

DARe welcomes contributions on all aspects of defeasible and ampliative reasoning such as (but 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

Submission Requirements

We invite submissions of papers presenting original research results or position statements. Submissions must be prepared using the Springer LNAI/LNCS format (which can be found here) and should be no longer than 13 pages.

Please submit to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dare17

Workshop Proceedings/Notes

Accepted papers will be made available electronically in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series. Copyright of papers remain with the authors.

The 2014 proceedings are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1212/

The 2015 proceedings are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1423/

The 2016 proceedings are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1626/

Attendance

The selection of accepted contributions will be based on relevance, significance and the work's potential to foster discussions and cross-pollination. Therefore submissions of ongoing work are also strongly encouraged.

At least one co-author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop.

Please check the LPNMR 2017 website for registration procedure, fees as well as cancellation policies.