This paper proposes a general discussion of the handling of imprecise and uncertain information in temporal reasoning in the framework of fuzzy sets and possibility theory. The introduction of fuzzy features in temporal reasoning can be related to different issues. First, it can be motivated by the need of a gradual, linguistic-like description of temporal relations even in the face of complete...

W hen we work with information from mul­ tiple sources, the formalism each employs to handle uncertainty may not be uniform. In order to be able to combine these knowl­ edge bases of different formats, we need to first establish a common basis for character­ izing and evaluating the different formalisms, and provide a semantics for the combined mechanism. A common framework can pro­ vide an inf...

In many ways, biomedical analysis is analogous to possibilistic reasoning. In spite of that, there are hardly any applications of possibility theory in biology or medicine. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the use of possibility theory in an epidemiological study. In the paper, we build the possibility distribution for the controlled bloodstream concentrations of any physiologically activ...

Automatic knowledge base enrichment methods rely critically on candidate axiom scoring. The most popular scoring heuristics proposed in the literature are based on statistical inference. We argue that such a probability-based framework is not always completely satisfactory and propose a novel, alternative scoring heuristics expressed in terms of possibility theory, whereby a candidate axiom rec...

Cross-linguistic work on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review work s...

This paper proposes a model for Information Retrieval (IR) based on possibilistic directed networks. Relations documents-terms and query-terms are modeled through possibility and necessity measures rather than a probability measure. The relevance value for the document given the query is measured by two degrees: the necessity and the possibility. More precisely, the user’s query triggers a prop...

The bipolar view in preference modeling distinguishes between negative and positive preferences. Negative preferences correspond to what is rejected, considered unacceptable, while positive preferences correspond to what is desired. But what is tolerated (i.e., not rejected) is not necessarily desired. Both negative and positive preferences can be a matter of degree. Bipolar preferences can be ...

The formal similarity between possibility theory and formal concept analysis, made ten years ago, has suggested the introduction in the latter setting of the counterpart of possibilistic operators, which were ignored before. These new operators can be related to the basic operator of formal concept analysis by a triple use of negations on the contexts, on the set-valued arguments and on the obt...

The paper deals with a lot sizing problem with ill-known demands modeled by fuzzy intervals whose membership functions are possibility distributions for the values of the uncertain demands. Optimization criteria, in the setting of possibility theory, that lead to choose robust production plans under fuzzy demands are given. Some algorithms for determining optimal robust production plans with re...

A key issue in the handling of temporal data is the treatment of persistence; in most approaches it consists in inferring defeasi­ ble conlusions by extrapolating from the ac­ tual knowledge of the history of the world; we propose here a gradual modelling of per­ sistence, following the idea that persistence is decreasing (the further we are from the last time point where a fluent is known to b...