The importance of the notion of context has emerged in several disciplines (e.g. philosophy of language, AI, computer science, cognitive linguistics, theories of mental representation) with different motivations. In the last ten years, the Mechanized Reasoning Group, leaded by Fausto Giunchiglia, has been developing a formal logic of contextual reasoning, which was successfully applied to many problems arising in the above disciplines. The goal of this course is to give an in-depth and comprehensive view of this work and to compare it with other proposed approaches both in philosophy and in AI. The course is structured in three parts:

• Philosophical Foundations. We introduce, describe and compare some of the most well-known approaches to modeling context (and contextual reasoning) in Philosophy, AI and Cognitive Science.
• Logics. We introduce two general logical principles, called Locality and Compatibility, which allow us to model most of the issues about context discussed in the literature. We introduce a semantics for locality and compatibility called Local Models Semantics (LMS) and a calculus for LMS, called MultiContext Systems (MCS).
• Applications. We show how LMS and MCS can be used to model and reason about: Intensional Logic, Multi-Agent systems, Information integration in distributed environments, Context construction, Meta reasoning.

• First Week Philosophical Foundations of Contexts
  • Monday 07/08: Introduction to context: metaphysical vs. cognitive approaches (slides.ps.gz)
  • Tuesday 08/08: A metaphysical logic of context: Kaplan's Logic of Demonstratives (slides.ps.gz)
  • Wednesday 09/08: Problems with the metaphysical approach: essential indexicals, communication, .... (slides.ps.gz)
  • Thursday 10/08: Toward a cognitive approach: McCarthy's contexts and Dinsmore distributed representations (slides.ps.gz)
  • Friday 11/08: Contextual reasoning and Local Models Semantics (introduction) (slides.ps.gz)
• Second Week Logical Foundations of Contexts
  • Monday 14/08: Multi Context Systems a proof system for local model semantics - introduction. (slides.ps.gz)
  • Tuesday 15/08: Proof theory of Multi Context Systems and Equivalence with Modal Logics. (slides.ps.gz)
  • Wednesday 16/08: Multi Context Systems for Propositional Attitudes. . (slides.ps.gz)
  • Thursday 17/08: Quantified Local Model Semantics, and "Quantifying in" Contexts. (slides.ps.gz)
  • Friday 18/08: Dynamic beliefs about a dynamic world. (slides.ps.gz)

• Benerecetti M., Bouquet P. & Ghidini C., Formalizing Belief Reports. The approach and a Case Study. Proceedings of VIII International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications (AIMSA'98), Sozopol (Bulgaria), September 21-23, 1998. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (1480), Springer Verlag.
• Benerecetti M., Bouquet P. & Ghidini C., Contextual Reasoning Distilled, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), to appear in 2000.
• M. Benerecetti, F. Giunchiglia, and L. Serafini MultiAgent Model Checking August 1997. Computational & Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems, special Issue of the Journal of Logic and Computation.
• Cimatti A., Serafini L., "Multi-Agent Reasoning with Belief Contexts: the Approach and a Case Study", In M. Wooldridge and N. Jennings (eds.), "Proceedings ECAI-94 workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages", LNCS series, Springer Verlag, 1994.
  
• Criscuolo G., Giunchiglia F., and Serafini L., A Foundation for Metareasoning, Part I: The proof theory, (draft version) Submitted for the publication to the Journal of Logic & Computation, Currently under revision.
• Criscuolo G., Giunchiglia F., and Serafini L., A Foundation for Metareasoning, Part II: The model theory (Draft version) Submitted for the publication to the Journal of Logic & Computation, Currently under revision.
• Ghidini C., Serafini L. Distributed First Order Logics. In D.M. Gabbay and M. De Rijke, editors, Frontiers of Combining Systems 2, Studies in Logic and Computation, No. 7, Research Studies Press Ltd. Baldock, Hertfordshire, England, UK, 2000, pp. 121-139.
• Giunchiglia F. and Bouquet P., Introduction to contextual reasoning. An Artificial Intelligence Perspective, in B. Kokinov (ed.), Perspectives on Cognitive Science, 3, NBU Press, Sofia (Bulgaria) 1997.
• Giunchiglia, F., and Ghidini, C. Local Models Semantics, or Contextual Reasoning = Locality + Compatibility. In Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'98). Morgan-Kauffman.
• Giunchiglia F., Serafini L. Multilanguage Hierarchical Logics (or: How we can do without modal logics), October 1991. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 65, pp. 29-70, 1994.
• Giunchiglia F., Serafini L., Giunchiglia E., Frixione M., Non-omniscient belief as context-based reasoning
  June 1992. In Proceedings "IJCAI-93, 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence", Chambery, France, 1993.
• L. Serafini, F. Giunchiglia, ML systems: A Proof Theory for Contexts. In Submitted to the Journal of Logic Language and Information. Technical Report 0006-01, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy, 2000.

• Bar-Hillel Y., Indexical Expressions, Mind (63), 1954.
• Dinsmore J., Partitioned Representations, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991
• McCarthy J., Notes on Formalizing Context, 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chambery, France, 1993.
• Kaplan D., Logic of Demonstratives, Journal of Philosophical Logic (8), 1978
• Perry J., The Problem of the Essential Indexical, Nous (13), 1979
• Perry J., Indexicals and Demonstratives, in Companion to the Philosophy of Language, R. Hale and C. Wright (eds.), Blackwell, 1997, Oxford

You are welcome to submit comment and pose questions about the course and about the content of the courses. Preliminary discussion is very useful for us, in order to address you need in the course. Comments and questions can be sent via e-mail to bouquet@cs.unitn.it and serafini@irst.itc.it 

Course slides

Click here to download the whole set of the course slides.