449 research outputs found
Reasoning with minimal models: efficient algorithms and applications
AbstractReasoning with minimal models is at the heart of many knowledge-representation systems. Yet it turns out that this task is formidable, even when very simple theories are considered. In this paper, we introduce the elimination algorithm, which performs, in linear time, minimal model finding and minimal model checking for a significant subclass of positive CNF theories which we call positive head-cycle-free (HCF) theories. We also prove that the task of minimal entailment is easier for positive HCF theories than it is for the class of all positive CNF theories. Finally, we show how variations of the elimination algorithm can be applied to allow queries posed on disjunctive deductive databases and disjunctive default theories to be answered in an efficient way
The DLV System for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
This paper presents the DLV system, which is widely considered the
state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive logic programming, and addresses
several aspects. As for problem solving, we provide a formal definition of its
kernel language, function-free disjunctive logic programs (also known as
disjunctive datalog), extended by weak constraints, which are a powerful tool
to express optimization problems. We then illustrate the usage of DLV as a tool
for knowledge representation and reasoning, describing a new declarative
programming methodology which allows one to encode complex problems (up to
-complete problems) in a declarative fashion. On the foundational
side, we provide a detailed analysis of the computational complexity of the
language of DLV, and by deriving new complexity results we chart a complete
picture of the complexity of this language and important fragments thereof.
Furthermore, we illustrate the general architecture of the DLV system which
has been influenced by these results. As for applications, we overview
application front-ends which have been developed on top of DLV to solve
specific knowledge representation tasks, and we briefly describe the main
international projects investigating the potential of the system for industrial
exploitation. Finally, we report about thorough experimentation and
benchmarking, which has been carried out to assess the efficiency of the
system. The experimental results confirm the solidity of DLV and highlight its
potential for emerging application areas like knowledge management and
information integration.Comment: 56 pages, 9 figures, 6 table
Introduction to the TPLP special issue, logic programming in databases: From Datalog to semantic-web rules
Much has happened in data and knowledge base research since the introduction
of the relational model in Codd (1970) and its strong logical foundations influence
its advances ever since. Logic has been a common ground where Database and
Artificial Intelligence research competed and collaborated with each other for a
long time (Abiteboul et al. 1995). The product of this joint effort has been a set of
logic-based formalisms, such as the Relational Calculus (Codd 1970), Datalog (Ceri
et al. 1990), Description Logics (Baader et al. 2007), etc., capturing not only the
structure but also the semantics of data in an explicit way, thus enabling complex
inference procedures.This special issue contains three rigorously reviewed articles addressing problems
that span from Query Answering to Data Mining. All these contributions have their
roots in the foundational formalisms of Data and Knowledge Bases such as Logic
Programming, Description Logic and Hybrid Logics, representing a clear example
of the effort that the Database and the Semantic-Web communities are producing to
bridge the various schools of thinking in modern Data and Knowledge Management
Approximate Assertional Reasoning Over Expressive Ontologies
In this thesis, approximate reasoning methods for scalable assertional reasoning are provided whose computational properties can be established in a well-understood way, namely in terms of soundness and completeness, and whose quality can be analyzed in terms of statistical measurements, namely recall and precision. The basic idea of these approximate reasoning methods is to speed up reasoning by trading off the quality of reasoning results against increased speed
Datalog Rewritability of Disjunctive Datalog Programs and its Applications to Ontology Reasoning
We study the problem of rewriting a disjunctive datalog program into plain
datalog. We show that a disjunctive program is rewritable if and only if it is
equivalent to a linear disjunctive program, thus providing a novel
characterisation of datalog rewritability. Motivated by this result, we propose
weakly linear disjunctive datalog---a novel rule-based KR language that extends
both datalog and linear disjunctive datalog and for which reasoning is
tractable in data complexity. We then explore applications of weakly linear
programs to ontology reasoning and propose a tractable extension of OWL 2 RL
with disjunctive axioms. Our empirical results suggest that many non-Horn
ontologies can be reduced to weakly linear programs and that query answering
over such ontologies using a datalog engine is feasible in practice.Comment: 14 pages. To appear at AAAI-1
Reasoning about Minimal Belief and Negation as Failure
We investigate the problem of reasoning in the propositional fragment of
MBNF, the logic of minimal belief and negation as failure introduced by
Lifschitz, which can be considered as a unifying framework for several
nonmonotonic formalisms, including default logic, autoepistemic logic,
circumscription, epistemic queries, and logic programming. We characterize the
complexity and provide algorithms for reasoning in propositional MBNF. In
particular, we show that entailment in propositional MBNF lies at the third
level of the polynomial hierarchy, hence it is harder than reasoning in all the
above mentioned propositional formalisms for nonmonotonic reasoning. We also
prove the exact correspondence between negation as failure in MBNF and negative
introspection in Moore's autoepistemic logic
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