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Formalization of psychological knowledge in answer set programming and its application

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2010

MARCELLO BALDUCCINI and
SARA GIROTTO
MARCELLO BALDUCCINI
Affiliation:
Intelligent Systems, KRL, Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, NY 14650-2102, USA (e-mail: marcello.balduccini@gmail.com)
SARA GIROTTO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA (e-mail: sara.girotto@ttu.edu)
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Abstract

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In this paper we explore the use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to formalize, and reason about, psychological knowledge. In the field of psychology, a considerable amount of knowledge is still expressed using only natural language. This lack of a formalization complicates accurate studies, comparisons, and verification of theories. We believe that ASP, a knowledge representation formalism allowing for concise and simple representation of defaults, uncertainty, and evolving domains, can be used successfully for the formalization of psychological knowledge. To demonstrate the viability of ASP for this task, in this paper we develop an ASP-based formalization of the mechanics of Short-Term Memory. We also show that our approach can have rather immediate practical uses by demonstrating an application of our formalization to the task of predicting a user's interaction with a graphical interface.

Keywords

answer set programmingreasoning about actions and changepsychologyshort-term memory

Information

Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 10 , Special Issue 4-6: 26th International Conference on Logic Programming , July 2010, pp. 725 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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