13 March 2001, Computational Logic Seminar, Luciano Serafini

13 March 2001, Computational Logic Seminar, Luciano Serafini
Speaker: Luciano Serafini (Trento)
Title: A Logic for context: Syntax, semantics and calculus
Date and Time: March 13, 2001, 13.30
Location: Room P.327, ILLC, Plantage Muidergracht 24, Amsterdam

Abstract:
The importance of the notion of context has emerged in several disciplines (e.g. philosophy of language, AI, computer science, cognitive linguistics, theories of mental representation) with different motivations. In the last ten years, the Mechanized Reasoning Group, leaded by Fausto Giunchiglia, has been developing a formal logic of contextual reasoning, which was successfully applied to many problems arising in the above disciplines. The goal of this talk is to give an introductory view of this work, focusing on the formal aspects. We briefly introduce, some of the most well-known approaches to modeling context (and contextual reasoning) in Philosophy, AI and Cognitive Science. We then introduce the general principles of contexts, called *Locality* and *Compatibility* We introduce a semantics for locality and compatibility called Local Models Semantics (LMS) and a calculus for LMS, called Multi-Context Systems (MCS). The above formalism support propositional contestual reasoning. We therefore propose a generalization to the quantified case.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/~mdr/ACLG/Local/seminar01-1.html.