This paper introduces a propositional encoding for lexicographic path orders
in connection with dependency pairs. This facilitates the application of SAT
solvers for termination analysis of term rewrite systems based on the
dependency pair method. We address two main inter-related issues and encode
them as satisfiability problems of propositional formulas that can be
efficiently handled by SAT solving: (1) the combined search for a lexicographic
path order together with an \emph{argument filtering} to orient a set of
inequalities; and (2) how the choice of the argument filtering influences the
set of inequalities that have to be oriented. We have implemented our
contributions in the termination prover AProVE. Extensive experiments show that
by our encoding and the application of SAT solvers one obtains speedups in
orders of magnitude as well as increased termination proving power