Entailment as a logical basis for incremental generation of causal relations

Abstract

A problem in knowledge engineering is investigated in order to determine how to generate automatically new valid causal relations from some known causal relations (e.g. given with the IF-THEN form). The authors discuss this problem from a logical viewpoint and propose using the entailment that is a primitive logical basis for the incremental generation of causal relations. After a brief comparison between relevance logics and entailment logic, the authors define a subclass of entailment logic, given an algebraic model for it, show its soundness based on the model, and discuss deductive entailment reasoning based on the logic. As a result, for given causal relations, new valid causal relations can be generated by deductive entailment reasoning based on the logic.<>