Revision operators with compact representations

Abstract

Despite the great theoretical advancements in the area of Belief Revision, there has been limited success in terms of implementations. One of the hurdles in implementing revision operators is that their specification (let alone their computation), requires substantial resources. On the other hand, implementing a specific revision operator, like Dalal's operator, would be of limited use. In this paper we generalise Dalal's construction, defining a whole family of concrete revision operators, called Parametrised Difference revision operators or PD operators for short. This family is wide enough to cover a wide range of different applications, and at the same time it is easy to represent. In addition to its semantic definition, we characterise the family of PD operators axiomatically (including a characterisation specifically for Dalal's operator), we prove its' compliance with Parikh's relevance-sensitive postulate (P), we study its computational complexity, and discuss its benefits for belief revision implementations.