Vivid Knowledge and Tractable Reasoning

One important characteristic of mundane, everyday, reasoning is that it is fast. Given the complexity of correct reasoning with representations sufficiently expressive to capture what people seem to know, commonsense reasoning must be done using shortcuts and defaults, or some other means of simplifying the retrieval of the inferential consequences of a set of facts. Instead of looking at syntactic restrictions on the representation, or at limited inference, we are exploring the use of 'vivid' forms for knowledge, in which determining of truth of a sentence is simply a database retrieval. The crux of the approach is a means for 'vivifying' a first-order knowledge base into a simple relational form.