A weighted causal theory for acquiring and utilizing open knowledge

• The work aims to provide a formal basis for acquiring and utilizing open knowledge.
• The core concept of knowledge gap is formulized based on causal theories.
• The weighted knowledge gap is introduced, providing insights for the expected applications.
• The complexity results of related reasoning tasks are presented thoroughly.
• The application of the theoretical results is illustrated in an example on a real robot.

Motivated by enabling intelligent robots/agents to take advantage of open-source knowledge resources to solve open-ended tasks, a weighted causal theory is introduced as the formal basis for the development of these robots/agents. The action model of a robot/agent is specified as a causal theory following McCain and Turner's nonmonotonic causal theories. New knowledge is needed when the robot/agent is given a user task that cannot be accomplished only with the action model. This problem is cast as a variant of abduction, that is, to find the most suitable set of causal rules from open-source knowledge resources, so that a plan for accomplishing the task can be computed using the action model together with the acquired knowledge. The core part of our theory is constructed based on credulous reasoning and the complexity of corresponding abductive reasoning is analyzed. The entire theory is established by adding weights to hypothetical causal rules and using them to compare competing explanations which induce causal models satisfying the task. Moreover, we sketch a model theoretic semantics for the weighted causal theory and present an algorithm for computing a weighted-abductive explanation. An application of the techniques proposed in this paper is illustrated in an example on our service robot, KeJia, in which the robot tries to acquire proper knowledge from OMICS, a large-scale open-source knowledge resource, and solve new tasks with the knowledge.