Automating commonsense reasoning using the event calculus

Abstract

Event calculus is used for automating various aspects of commonsense reasoning such as everyday domains including space, time, and mentalstates, with the help of entities such as events, properties, and timepoints. Event enable the description of discrete change, while a released property following a certain trajectory or function of time is specified to describe continuous change. The Discrete Event Calculus Reasoner solves event calculus projection and explanation problems using satisfiability (SAT), while each model produced fills in facts not provided as input. Commonsense reasoning using the event calculus is used in areas such as business systems, natural language understanding, and robotics. Methods based on probability theory can be used to quantify uncertainty about commonsense knowledge, scenario, and inferences.