A connectionist approach to abductive problems: Employing a learning algorithm

This paper presents preliminary results of an application of artificial neural networks and Backpropagation learning algorithm to solve logical abductive problems. To represent logic programs in the form of artificial neural networks CIL
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P approach proposed by Garcez et al. [3] is employed. Our abductive procedure makes use of translation of a logic program representing a knowledge base into a neural network, training of the neural network with an example representing an abductive goal and translation of the trained network back to the form of a logic program. An abductive hypothesis is represented as the symmetric difference between the initial logic program and the one obtained after training of the network. The first part of the paper introduces formal description of the tools used to model the abductive process, while the second part illustrates our contribution with results of a few computational experiments and discusses the ways of possible improvements of the proposed procedure.