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General Intelligence :

Abduction

Abduction is the reverse of deduction. It also means "finding the explanation of something". From P → Q and given Q, we abduce P. This is also equivalent to "finding the explanation of Q". For example, if we know that:

it was raining → the grass is wet

then given "the grass is wet", we arrive at the explanation that "it was raining".

Algorithmically abduction can be computed using the reverse of deduction algorithms such as resolution, but its complexity is in general higher than deduction.

In common sense reasoning we often rely on abduction to fill out "missing information", so it is a very powerful mechanism.

In G₀, we use the natural language processing framework proposed by Jerry Hobbs, which is based on abduction to interpret natural language sentences.

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Nov/2007 (C) GIRG