Default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases Complexity and 2000

Abstract:  . Conditional knowledge bases have been proposed as belief bases that include defeasible rules (also called defaults) of the form " ! ", which informally read as "generally, if then ." Such rules may have exceptions, which can be handled in different ways. A number of entailment semantics for conditional knowledge bases have been proposed in the literature. However, while the semantic properties and interrelationships of these formalisms are quite well understood, about their computational properties only partial results are known so far. In this paper, we fill these gaps and first draw a precise picture of the complexity of default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases: Given a conditional knowledge base KB and a default ! , does KB entail ! ? We classify the complexity of this problem for a number of well-known approaches (including Goldszmidt et al.'s maximum entropy approach and Geffner's conditional entailment), where we consider the general propositional cas...