Towards a General Framework for Kinds of Forgetting in Common-Sense Belief Management

Abstract

While humans have developed extremely effective ways of forgetting outdated or currently irrelevant information, freeing them to process ever-increasing amounts of information, there seems to be a gap between the technically defined notions of forgetting in knowledge representation and the common-sense understanding of forgetting. In order to bring different notions of forgetting closer together, we elaborate and identify kinds and contexts of forgetting from a common sense perspective. We present abstract formalizations of operations involving forgetting in a generic axiomatic style. We instantiate and refine this abstract framework with conditional beliefs and ordinal conditional functions as a high-level semantics. Using a general concept of change employing the principle of conditional preservation, we also introduce OCF-based realizations of forgetting operations inspired by cognitive psychology. Thereby, our work may be used to further develop a general view on forgetting in artificial intelligence and to initiate and enhance the interaction and exchange among research lines dealing with forgetting.