Peirce: a tool for abductive inference

Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, has been used in artificial intelligence as a framework for solving problems ranging from diagnosis, to test interpretation, to theory formation, to natural language understanding, to perception. Previous research on computational models of abduction has suggested that a single generic strategy may be used to perform abductions in a variety of domains and across very diverse problems. This paper describes a generic strategy for abduction and a tool, Peirce, for constructing abductive problem solving systems.<
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