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Borderline Vs. Unknown: Comparing Three-Valued Representations of Imperfect Information Davide Ciucci, Didier Dubois, Jonathan Lawry

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Borderline Vs. Unknown: Comparing Three-Valued Representations of Imperfect Information Davide Ciucci, Didier Dubois, Jonathan Lawry Borderline vs. unknown: comparing three-valued representations of imperfect information Davide Ciucci, Didier Dubois, Jonathan Lawry To cite this version: Davide Ciucci, Didier Dubois, Jonathan Lawry. Borderline vs. unknown: comparing three-valued representations of imperfect information. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, Elsevier, 2014, vol. 55 (n° 9), pp. 1866-1889. 10.1016/j.ijar.2014.07.004. hal-01154064 HAL Id: hal-01154064 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01154064 Submitted on 21 May 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Open Archive TOULOUSE Archive Ouverte ( OATAO ) OATAO is a n open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse .fr/ Eprints ID : 13234 To link to this article : DOI:10.1016/j.ijar.2014.07.004 URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijar.2014.07.004 To cite this version : Ciucci, Davide and Dubois, Didier and Lawry, Jonathan Borderline vs. unknown : comparing three-valued representations of imperfect information. (2014) International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, vol. 55 (n° 9). pp. 1866-1889. ISSN 0888-613X Any correspondance concerning this service should be sent to the repository administrator: staff -oatao@listes -diff.inp -toulouse.fr Borderline vs. unknown: comparing three-valued representations of imperfect information Davide Ciucci a , Didier Dubois b, Jonathan Lawry c a Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Viale Sarca 336/14, 20126 Milano, Italy b IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse cedex 4, France c Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Queen’s Building, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, United Kingdom a b s t r a c t In this paper we compare the expressive power of elementary representation formats for vague, incomplete or conflicting information. These include Boolean valuation pairs introduced by Lawry and González-Rodríguez, orthopairs of sets of variables, Boolean possibility and necessity measures, three-valued valuations, supervaluations. We make explicit their connections with strong Kleene logic and with Belnap logic of conflicting Keywords: information. The formal similarities between 3-valued approaches to vagueness and Kleene logic formalisms that handle incomplete information often lead to a confusion between degrees Partial models of truth and degrees of uncertainty. Yet there are important differences that appear at Orthopairs the interpretive level: while truth-functional logics of vagueness are accepted by a part of Vagueness the scientific community (even if questioned by supervaluationists), the truth-functionality Incomplete information assumption of three-valued calculi for handling incomplete information looks questionable, Belnap logic compared to the non-truth-functional approaches based on Boolean possibility–necessity Supervaluations pairs. This paper aims to clarify the similarities and differences between the two situations. We also study to what extent operations for comparing and merging information items in the form of orthopairs can be expressed by means of operations on valuation pairs, three- valued valuations and underlying possibility distributions. 1. Introduction Three-valued logics have been used for different purposes, depending on the meaning of the third truth-value. Among them, Kleene logic [29] is typically assumed to deal with incomplete knowledge, with the third truth-value interpreted as unknown. Another possibility is to interpret the additional truth-value as borderline, as a means of representing borderline cases for vague predicates [28]. It is then tempting to use Kleene logic as a simple logic of non-Boolean predicates as done recently by Lawry and González-Rodríguez [32]. They introduced a new formalism to handle three-valued vague predicates by means of upper and lower Boolean valuations. Basic three-valued connectives of conjunction, disjunction and negation can be expressed by composing Boolean valuation pairs. Moreover, they showed how to recover the connectives of Belnap 4-valued logic of conflict in terms of Boolean valuation pairs. They also use another equivalent representation consisting of pairs of subsets of atomic variables that are disjoint when they represent Kleene valuations. Lawry and Tang [33] interpret the supervaluation approach to vagueness in terms of general non-truth functional valuation pairs respecting Boolean tau- tologies. However, three-valued valuations also encode Boolean partial models, like for instance in partial logic [6]. Orthopairs of variable sets then represent the sets of Boolean variables that are known to be true and of those that are known to be false. The third truth-value then refers to the unknown. The natural generalisation of partial models consists of epistemic sets, understood as non-empty subsets of interpretations of a Boolean language, representing the information possessed by an agent, which can be viewed as all-or-nothing possibility distributions [45]. Such possibility distributions generalise to formulas in the form of possibility and necessity functions [42,18]. Possibility theory, even in its all-or-nothing form, is not truth-functional, which explains apparent anomalies in Kleene logic for handing incomplete information [19]. More recently Lawry and Dubois [31] proposed operations for merging valuation pairs and study their expression in terms of three-valued truth-tables, as well as pairs of subsets of variables. In this paper, we focus on the use of orthopairs of subsets of variables for handling vague or incomplete information. We compare the expressive power of three-valued valuations, Boolean valuation pairs, and orthopairs. The aim is to ex- pose the differences between these three representation tools. In contrast with these truth-functional representation tools, we consider non-truth functional ones, such as possibility–necessity pairs and supervaluations, respectively used for mod- elling incomplete information and vagueness, and show their formal similarities, as well as their differences with Boolean valuation pairs. Besides, we show that orthopairs are more difficult to handle than three-valued valuations and Boolean valuation pairs when it comes to evaluating logical expressions in Kleene logic, even if the three notions are in one-to-one correspondence. We then study informational orderings and combination rules for the merging of pieces of information that can be expressed in terms of orthopairs. Again, some discrepancies are highlighted in their expressive power compared to other representation formats, especially possibility distributions. This paper is structured as follows. The next section presents three different ways of encoding three-valued valuations. Section 3 presents two uses of these representations, for modelling borderline cases of vague predicates, and for incomplete Boolean information. Section 4 casts them in the setting of possibility theory. The strong formal similarity between super- valuation pairs and possibility–necessity pairs is also highlighted. Section 5 extends these representations so as to account for conflict in accordance with Belnap logic. We then obtain generalised valuation pairs that can be inconsistent, and general pairs of subsets of variables that can overlap (on variables for which knowledge is inconsistent). The problem of importing the recursive definitions of consistent pairs of valuations for logical expressions into the framework of orthopairs of variables is discussed in detail in Section 6. Section 7 considers various notions of ordering relations between three-valued valuations and various combination rules. It studies whether they can be encoded in the three formats proposed in this paper. Finally in Section 8, we check whether these combination operations are expressible in terms of the fusion of general subsets of interpretations. 2. Three-valued valuations A 1 1 Let e b a finite set of (propositional) variables. We denote by 3 the set {0, 2 , 1}, equipped with total order 0 < 2 <, 1 loosely understood as a set of truth-values with 0 and 1 respectively referring to false and true. Definition 2.1. A three-valued valuations i a mapping τ : A → 3. A A We denote by 3 the set of three-valued valuations. A particular subset of 3 consists of Boolean valuations (or inter- A pretations), i.e. mappings w : A → {0, 1}; we denote by Ω{ = 0, 1 } the set of all such valuations. In this section we introduce two alternative representations of three-valued valuations together with their extensions to logical expressions in Kleene logic: orthopairs and ordered pairs of Boolean valuations. 2.1. Representations of three-valued valuations Definition 2.2. By an orthopair, we mean a pair (P, Nf ) o disjoint subsets of variables: P, N ⊆ A and ∅P ∩ N = . A three-valued valuation τ : A → 3 induces an orthopair as follows: a ∈f P i τ (a) =, 1 a ∈f N i τ (a) =. 0 So
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