This research is directed at the investigation of formal mechanisms to focus the reasoning and handle contradictions in formal common sense reasoning framework. An important contribution of the research is the framework it will provide for truly real time common sense reasoning. The proposed research is the directed at enhancing the step logic formalism to provide a formal model to real time common sense reasoning. Step logic is a formalism designed to model the ongoing process of deduction. What makes the step logic formalism so unique is that the logic explicitly allows unsound inferences (i.e. contradictions can arise). This is done in the interest of efficiency (that is, to avoid the consistency check problem). The objectives of the research are to investigate ways of focusing one's reasoning, to develop a means of focusing the reasoning of the step logic formalism, to investigate methods of handling contradictions efficiently, and to develop a more general method of handling contradictions within the steplogic formalism. The attainment of these objectives will result in a non monotonic reasoning formalism that is not only tractable, but real time. The research issues will be addressed both in terms of theory as well as implementation.
