This would be an excellent topic to choose. The historical and bibliographical notes at the end of each chapter by Russell and Norvig are reliable and insightful. Citeseer provides a list of the most cited papers in computer science . We propose a new declarative semantics for logic programs with negation. Computers and Thought are the two categories that together define Artificial Intelligence as a discipline.
Abduction is inference to the best explanation.
We report results from large-scale experiments in satisfiability testing. Each of these papers is a good starting point for finding five additional related and recent papers. Cora also has a list of top papers in knowledge representation here . Don't just choose papers that sound interesting individually. Papers are related sufficiently closely if you can compare them with each other directly for quality, and you can evaluate where one paper asks or answers questions that another paper fails to.