Abductive analogical reasoning

If a knowledge base does not have all of the necessary clauses for reasoning, ordinary hypothetical reasoning systems cannot explain observations. In this case, it is necessary to explain such observations by abductive reasoning, supplemental reasoning, or approximate reasoning. The inference in this paper explains the observation by supplementing missing knowledge with reference to similar knowledge when an observation cannot be explained because necessary knowledge is lacking. However, it is somewhat difficult to find clauses to explain an observation without hints. Therefore, an abductive strategy (CMS) is used to find missing clauses. A piece of knowledge which is similar to the missing knowledge is sought in the knowledge base and mapped to the knowledge in the same problem domain as the missing knowledge. Then the observation is explained by generated hypotheses similar to the knowledge in the knowledge base. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 31(1): 11–19, 2000