Inheritance Hierarchies and Partial Ordering

Abstract

In this paper, we present a set of inference rules for the property inheritance theories often encountered in commonsense reasoning. Then, we generalize the set of rules so that the monotonicity of function symbols or predicate symbols can be encoded in the inference rules. Consequently, we can replace cumbersome axioms by some succinct rules. We also discuss the completeness and soundness of these rules and compare the rule-based approach to other related works.