3,930 research outputs found
The Challenge of Unifying Semantic and Syntactic Inference Restrictions
While syntactic inference restrictions don't play an important role for SAT, they are an essential reasoning technique for more expressive logics, such as first-order logic, or fragments thereof. In particular, they can result in short proofs or model representations. On the other hand, semantically guided inference systems enjoy important properties, such as the generation of solely non-redundant clauses. I discuss to what extend the two paradigms may be unifiable
Distributed First Order Logic
Distributed First Order Logic (DFOL) has been introduced more than ten years
ago with the purpose of formalising distributed knowledge-based systems, where
knowledge about heterogeneous domains is scattered into a set of interconnected
modules. DFOL formalises the knowledge contained in each module by means of
first-order theories, and the interconnections between modules by means of
special inference rules called bridge rules. Despite their restricted form in
the original DFOL formulation, bridge rules have influenced several works in
the areas of heterogeneous knowledge integration, modular knowledge
representation, and schema/ontology matching. This, in turn, has fostered
extensions and modifications of the original DFOL that have never been
systematically described and published. This paper tackles the lack of a
comprehensive description of DFOL by providing a systematic account of a
completely revised and extended version of the logic, together with a sound and
complete axiomatisation of a general form of bridge rules based on Natural
Deduction. The resulting DFOL framework is then proposed as a clear formal tool
for the representation of and reasoning about distributed knowledge and bridge
rules
Practical Reasoning for Very Expressive Description Logics
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms
mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from
atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications,
but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides
satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles and
functional restrictions with respect to general concept inclusion axioms and
role hierarchies; early experiments indicate that this algorithm is well-suited
for implementation. Additionally, we show that ALC extended with just
transitive and inverse roles is still in PSPACE. We investigate the limits of
decidability for this family of DLs, showing that relaxing the constraints
placed on the kinds of roles used in number restrictions leads to the
undecidability of all inference problems. Finally, we describe a number of
optimisation techniques that are crucial in obtaining implementations of the
decision procedures, which, despite the worst-case complexity of the problem,
exhibit good performance with real-life problems
Graph Based Reduction of Program Verification Conditions
Increasing the automaticity of proofs in deductive verification of C programs
is a challenging task. When applied to industrial C programs known heuristics
to generate simpler verification conditions are not efficient enough. This is
mainly due to their size and a high number of irrelevant hypotheses. This work
presents a strategy to reduce program verification conditions by selecting
their relevant hypotheses. The relevance of a hypothesis is determined by the
combination of a syntactic analysis and two graph traversals. The first graph
is labeled by constants and the second one by the predicates in the axioms. The
approach is applied on a benchmark arising in industrial program verification
Towards an Effective Decision Procedure for LTL formulas with Constraints
This paper presents an ongoing work that is part of a more wide-ranging
project whose final scope is to define a method to validate LTL formulas w.r.t.
a program written in the timed concurrent constraint language tccp, which is a
logic concurrent constraint language based on the concurrent constraint
paradigm of Saraswat. Some inherent notions to tccp processes are
non-determinism, dealing with partial information in states and the monotonic
evolution of the information. In order to check an LTL property for a process,
our approach is based on the abstract diagnosis technique. The concluding step
of this technique needs to check the validity of an LTL formula (with
constraints) in an effective way.
In this paper, we present a decision method for the validity of temporal
logic formulas (with constraints) built by our abstract diagnosis technique.Comment: Part of WLPE 2013 proceedings (arXiv:1308.2055
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