High-Level Languages for Describing Action and Change

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9306751 Lifschitz The goal of this research is to develop and study high-level declarative languages designed specifically for describing action and change. The available methods for representing properties of actions in logic will be characterized as translations from high- level languages into monotonic or nonmonotonic logic-based formalisms. The claims that these methods are adequate will be stated as soundness or completeness properties of the corresponding translations, and the validity of these claims will be investigated. Methods for describing nondeterministic actions will be developed, and their adequacy will be investigated in a similar way. Competing methods (using different ontologies of action or different nonmonotonic logics) will be compared by studying the high-level languages to which they are applicable. Translation of high-level action languages into traditional programming languages will also be studied. This will allow the application of software tools developed for program verification to the automation of some forms of common sense reasoning.