Belief Functions and Default Reasoning

Abstract

We present a new approach to dealing with default information based on the theory of belief functions. Our semantic structures, inspired by Adams' epsilon-semantics, are epsilon-belief assignments, where values committed to focal elements are either close to 0 or close to 1. We define two systems based on these structures, and relate them to other non-monotonic systems presented in the literature. We show that our second system correctly addresses the well-known problems of specificity, irrelevance, blocking of inheritance, ambiguity, and redundancy.