Event-Object Reasoning with Curated Knowledge Bases: Deriving Missing Information

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of recovering missing information in knowledge bases to improve reasoning about events, using formal methods and Answer Set Programming (ASP) to enhance question answering capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a formal framework and ASP implementation for recovering missing event-related information in knowledge bases.

Findings

Formal definition of missing information recovery

ASP implementation demonstrating the approach

Implications for answering why and how questions

Abstract

The broader goal of our research is to formulate answers to why and how questions with respect to knowledge bases, such as AURA. One issue we face when reasoning with many available knowledge bases is that at times needed information is missing. Examples of this include partially missing information about next sub-event, first sub-event, last sub-event, result of an event, input to an event, destination of an event, and raw material involved in an event. In many cases one can recover part of the missing knowledge through reasoning. In this paper we give a formal definition about how such missing information can be recovered and then give an ASP implementation of it. We then discuss the implication of this with respect to answering why and how questions.