Abstract

Changing One’s Mind: Erase or Rewind?
Changing One’s Mind: Erase or Rewind?
Célia da Costa Pereira, Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi, Serena Villata
We address the issue, in cognitive agents, of possible loss of previous information, which later might turn out to be correct when new information becomes available. To this aim, we propose a framework for changing the agent's mind without erasing forever previous information, thus allowing its recovery in case the change turns out to be wrong. In this new framework, a piece of information is represented as an argument which can be more or less accepted depending on the trustworthiness of the agent who proposes it. We adopt possibility theory to represent uncertainty about the information, and to model the fact that information sources can be only partially trusted. The originality of the proposed framework lies in the following two points: (i) argument reinstatement is mirrored in belief reinstatement in order to avoid the loss of previous information; (ii) new incoming information is represented under the form of arguments and it is associated with a plausibility degree depending on the trustworthiness of the information source.