Parametric connectives in Disjunctive Logic Programming

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Perri, Simona | Leone, Nicola

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics, University of Calabria, I‐87030 Rende (CS), Italy E‐mail: {leone,perri}@mat.unical.it

Abstract: Disjunctive Logic Programming (DLP) is an advanced formalism for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). DLP is very expressive in a precise mathematical sense: it allows to express every property of finite structures that is decidable in the complexity class ΣP2 (NPNP). Importantly, the DLP encodings are often simple and natural. In this paper, we single out some limitations of DLP for KRR, which cannot naturally express problems where the size of the disjunction is not known “a priori” (like N‐Coloring), but it is part of the input. To overcome these limitations, we further enhance the knowledge modelling abilities of DLP, by extending this language by Parametric Connectives (OR and AND). These connectives allow us to represent compactly the disjunction/conjunction of a set of atoms having a given property. We formally define the semantics of the new language, named DLP∨,∧ and we show the usefulness of the new constructs on relevant knowledge‐based problems. We address implementation issues and discuss related works.

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 63-74, 2004