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The token reification approach to temporal reasoning.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Han Reichgelt

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1996

ISSN

0004-3702

Abstract

The approach to temporal reasoning which has proven most popular in AI is the reified approach. In this approach, one introduces names for events and states and uses special predicates to assert that an event or state occurs or holds at a particular time. However, recently the reified approach has come under attack, both on technical and on ontological grounds. Thus, it has been claimed that at least some reified temporal logics do not give one more expressive power than provided by alternative approaches. Moreover, it has been argued that the reification of event and state types in reified temporal logics, rather than event and state tokens, makes the ontology more complicated than necessary. In this paper, we present a new reified temporal logic, called TRL, which we believe avoids most of these objections. It is based on the idea of reifying event tokens instead of event types. However, unlike other such attempts, our logic contains “meaningful” names for event tokens, thus allowing us to quantify over all event tokens that meet a certain criterion. The resulting logic is more expressive than alternative approaches. Moreover, it avoids the ontologically objectionable reification of event types, while staying within classical first-order predicate logic.

Comments

Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in Artificial Intelligence, 83, 59-74. doi: 10.1016/0004-3702(94)00093-X. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Language

en_US

Publisher

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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