Computing Preferred Answer Sets by Meta-Interpretation in Answer Set Programming

Most recently, Answer Set Programming (ASP) is attracting interest as a new paradigm for problem solving. An important aspect which needs to be supported is the handling of preferences between rules, for which several approaches have been presented. In this paper, we consider the problem of implementing preference handling approaches by means of meta-interpreters in Answer Set Programming. In particular, we consider the preferred answer set approaches by Brewka and Eiter, by Delgrande, Schaub and Tompits, and by Wang, Zhou and Lin. We present suitable meta-interpreters for these semantics using DLV, which is an efficient engine for ASP. Moreover, we also present a meta-interpreter for the weakly preferred answer set approach by Brewka and Eiter, which uses the weak constraint feature of DLV as a tool for expressing and solving an underlying optimization problem. We also consider advanced meta-interpreters, which make use of graph-based characterizations and often allow for more efficient computations. Our approach shows the suitability of ASP in general and of DLV in particular for fast prototyping. This can be fruitfully exploited for experimenting with new languages and knowledge-representation formalisms.Comment: 34 pages, appeared as a Technical Report at KBS of the Vienna University of Technology, see http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/research/reports

Logic Programs with Compiled Preferences

We describe an approach for compiling preferences into logic programs under the answer set semantics. An ordered logic program is an extended logic program in which rules are named by unique terms, and in which preferences among rules are given by a set of dedicated atoms. An ordered logic program is transformed into a second, regular, extended logic program wherein the preferences are respected, in that the answer sets obtained in the transformed theory correspond with the preferred answer sets of the original theory. Our approach allows both the specification of static orderings (as found in most previous work), in which preferences are external to a logic program, as well as orderings on sets of rules. In large part then, we are interested in describing a general methodology for uniformly incorporating preference information in a logic program. Since the result of our translation is an extended logic program, we can make use of existing implementations, such as dlv and smodels. To this end, we have developed a compiler, available on the web, as a front-end for these programming systems