Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.11, 2019

Research on and Implementation of the Kinship Inference System

(Abstract)

Lu Dawei and Yuan Yulin

Seen from the point of view of the two elements of knowledge representation and kinship inference rules, the existing system of kinship inference lacks theoretical discussion of kinship and its forms and structures. Kinship inference—essentially the inference of blood relationships—is complex. The structure of such relationships is a recursive graph in which the basic unit, consisting of “father,” “mother,” and “child,” is defined as the shortest path in the mapping of consanguineous structures. The expression of kinship is redesigned using marital, filial, parental, and sibling relationships as the four basic blood ties, with kin relationships being used to determine system boundaries and formally describe the relevant kinship concepts. On this basis, we constructed a kinship inference system based on the mapping of consanguineous structures, carrying out the complex incomplete task of kinship reasoning by using the four operations of positioning, matching, retrieving the shortest path and transposition. Compared with previous kinship reasoning, the logic and procedures of our new system are more intuitive and concise, thus ensuring the completeness and accuracy of kinship inference. Relative inference algorithms based on blood ties can be extended to kinship inference in other languages.