Annotated Defeasible Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces annotated defeasible logic, a flexible formalism that allows combining multiple forms of defeasibility to better model complex reasoning scenarios like legal contexts.

Contribution

It proposes a novel annotated defeasible logic framework that supports multiple defeasible reasoning styles within a single formalism.

Findings

Supports multiple defeasibility forms simultaneously

Establishes properties of the annotated defeasible logic

Enhances modeling of complex reasoning scenarios

Abstract

Defeasible logics provide several linguistic features to support the expression of defeasible knowledge. There is also a wide variety of such logics, expressing different intuitions about defeasible reasoning. However, the logics can only combine in trivial ways. This limits their usefulness in contexts where different intuitions are at play in different aspects of a problem. In particular, in some legal settings, different actors have different burdens of proof, which might be expressed as reasoning in different defeasible logics. In this paper, we introduce annotated defeasible logic as a flexible formalism permitting multiple forms of defeasibility, and establish some properties of the formalism. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.