A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Heng, Jiang, Guifei, Quan, Donghui
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhang, Heng
Jiang, Guifei
Quan, Donghui
author_facet Zhang, Heng
Jiang, Guifei
Quan, Donghui
contents There has been a longstanding dispute over which formalism is the best for representing knowledge in AI. The well-known "declarative vs. procedural controversy" is concerned with the choice of utilizing declarations or procedures as the primary mode of knowledge representation. The ongoing debate between symbolic AI and connectionist AI also revolves around the question of whether knowledge should be represented implicitly (e.g., as parametric knowledge in deep learning and large language models) or explicitly (e.g., as logical theories in traditional knowledge representation and reasoning). To address these issues, we propose a general framework to capture various knowledge representation formalisms in which we are interested. Within the framework, we find a family of universal knowledge representation formalisms, and prove that all universal formalisms are recursively isomorphic. Moreover, we show that all pairwise intertranslatable formalisms that admit the padding property are also recursively isomorphic. These imply that, up to an offline compilation, all universal (or natural and equally expressive) representation formalisms are in fact the same, which thus provides a partial answer to the aforementioned dispute.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_11855
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge
Zhang, Heng
Jiang, Guifei
Quan, Donghui
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
Logic in Computer Science
There has been a longstanding dispute over which formalism is the best for representing knowledge in AI. The well-known "declarative vs. procedural controversy" is concerned with the choice of utilizing declarations or procedures as the primary mode of knowledge representation. The ongoing debate between symbolic AI and connectionist AI also revolves around the question of whether knowledge should be represented implicitly (e.g., as parametric knowledge in deep learning and large language models) or explicitly (e.g., as logical theories in traditional knowledge representation and reasoning). To address these issues, we propose a general framework to capture various knowledge representation formalisms in which we are interested. Within the framework, we find a family of universal knowledge representation formalisms, and prove that all universal formalisms are recursively isomorphic. Moreover, we show that all pairwise intertranslatable formalisms that admit the padding property are also recursively isomorphic. These imply that, up to an offline compilation, all universal (or natural and equally expressive) representation formalisms are in fact the same, which thus provides a partial answer to the aforementioned dispute.
title A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11855