Simplification of many-valued logic formulas using anti-links

We present the theoretical foundations of the many-valued generalization of a technique for simplifying large non-clausal formulas in propositional logic, that is called "removal of anti-links". Possible applications of anti-links include computation of prime implicates of large non-clausal formulas as required, for example, in diagnosis. Anti-links do not compute any normal form of a given formula themselves, rather, they remove certain forms of redundancy from formulas in negation normal form (NNF). Their main advantage is that no clausal normal form has to be computed in order to remove redundant parts of a formula. In this paper, we define an anti-link operation on a generic language for expressing many-valued logic formulas called "signed NNF" and we show that all interesting properties of two-valued anti-links generalize to the many-valued setting, although in a non-trivial way

Negation and Dichotomy

The present contribution might be regarded as a kind of defense of the common sense in logic. It is demonstrated that if the classical negation is interpreted as the minimal negation with n = 2 truth values, then deviant logics can be conceived as extension of the classical bivalent frame. Such classical apprehension of negation is possible in non- classical logics as well, if truth value is internalized and bivalence is replaced by bipartition

A Polynomial Translation of Logic Programs with Nested Expressions into Disjunctive Logic Programs: Preliminary Report

Nested logic programs have recently been introduced in order to allow for arbitrarily nested formulas in the heads and the bodies of logic program rules under the answer sets semantics. Nested expressions can be formed using conjunction, disjunction, as well as the negation as failure operator in an unrestricted fashion. This provides a very flexible and compact framework for knowledge representation and reasoning. Previous results show that nested logic programs can be transformed into standard (unnested) disjunctive logic programs in an elementary way, applying the negation as failure operator to body literals only. This is of great practical relevance since it allows us to evaluate nested logic programs by means of off-the-shelf disjunctive logic programming systems, like DLV. However, it turns out that this straightforward transformation results in an exponential blow-up in the worst-case, despite the fact that complexity results indicate that there is a polynomial translation among both formalisms. In this paper, we take up this challenge and provide a polynomial translation of logic programs with nested expressions into disjunctive logic programs. Moreover, we show that this translation is modular and (strongly) faithful. We have implemented both the straightforward as well as our advanced transformation; the resulting compiler serves as a front-end to DLV and is publicly available on the Web.Comment: 10 pages; published in Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasonin