An Answer Set Programming Framework for Reasoning About Truthfulness of Statements by Agents

We propose a framework for answering the question of whether statements made by an agent can be believed, in light of observations made over time. The basic components of the framework are a formalism for reasoning about actions, changes, and observations and a formalism for default reasoning. The framework is suitable for concrete implementation, e.g., using answer set programming for asserting the truthfulness of statements made by agents, starting from observations, knowledge about the actions of the agents, and a theory about the “normal” behavior of agents. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.4.1 Mathematical Logic, I.2.3 Deduction and Theorem Proving, I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods, I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence