Thirty years of Epistemic Specifications

The language of epistemic specifications and epistemic logic programs extends disjunctive logic programs under the stable model semantics with modal constructs called subjective literals. Using subjective literals, it is possible to check whether a regular literal is true in every or some stable models of the program, those models, in this context also called belief sets, being collected in a set called world view. This allows for representing, within the language, whether some proposition should be understood accordingly to the open or the closed world assumption. Several attempts for capturing the intuitions underlying the language by means of a formal semantics were given, resulting in a multitude of proposals that makes it difficult to understand the current state of the art. In this article, we provide an overview of the inception of the field and the knowledge representation and reasoning tasks it is suitable for. We also provide a detailed analysis of properties of proposed semantics, and an outlook of challenges to be tackled by future research in the area.

Unfounded Sets for Disjunctive Hybrid MKNF Knowledge Bases

Combining the closed-world reasoning of answer set programming (ASP) with the open-world reasoning of ontologies broadens the space of applications of reasoners. Disjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases succinctly extend ASP and in some cases without increasing the complexity of reasoning tasks. However, in many cases, solver development is lagging behind. As the result, the only known method of solving disjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases is based on guess-and-verify, as formulated by Motik and Rosati in their original work. A main obstacle is understanding how constraint propagation may be performed by a solver, which, in the context of ASP, centers around the computation of \textit{unfounded atoms}, the atoms that are false given a partial interpretation. In this work, we build towards improving solvers for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases with disjunctive rules: We formalize a notion of unfounded sets for these knowledge bases, identify lower complexity bounds, and demonstrate how we might integrate these developments into a DPLL-based solver. We discuss challenges introduced by ontologies that are not present in the development of solvers for disjunctive logic programs, which warrant some deviations from traditional definitions of unfounded sets. We compare our work with prior definitions of unfounded sets.

The Fusemate Logic Programming System

Fusemate is a logic programming system that implements the possible model semantics for disjunctive logic programs. Its input language is centered around a weak notion of stratification with comprehension and aggregation operators on top of it. Fusemate is implemented as a shallow embedding in the Scala programming language. This enables using Scala data types natively as terms, a tight interface with external systems, and it makes model computation available as an ordinary container data structure constructor. The paper describes the above features and implementation aspects. It also demonstrates them with a non-trivial use-case, the embedding of the description logic $$\mathcal ALCIF$$ A L C I F into Fusemate’s input language.

Determining Inference Semantics for Disjunctive Logic Programs (Extended Abstract)

[Gelfond and Lifschitz, 1991] introduced simple disjunctive logic programs and defined the answer set semantics called GL-semantics. We observed that the requirement of GL-semantics, i.e., an answer set should be a minimal model of the GL-reduct may be too strong and exclude some answer sets that would be reasonably acceptable. To address this, we present a novel and more permissive semantics, called determining inference semantics.

Inconsistency Proofs for ASP: The ASP - DRUPE Format

Answer Set Programming (ASP) solvers are highly-tuned and complex procedures that implicitly solve the consistency problem, i.e., deciding whether a logic program admits an answer set. Verifying whether a claimed answer set is formally a correct answer set of the program can be decided in polynomial time for (normal) programs. However, it is far from immediate to verify whether a program that is claimed to be inconsistent, indeed does not admit any answer sets. In this paper, we address this problem and develop the new proof format ASP-DRUPE for propositional, disjunctive logic programs, including weight and choice rules. ASP-DRUPE is based on the Reverse Unit Propagation (RUP) format designed for Boolean satisfiability. We establish correctness of ASP-DRUPE and discuss how to integrate it into modern ASP solvers. Later, we provide an implementation of ASP-DRUPE into the wasp solver for normal logic programs.

Extending Well-Founded Semantics with Clark’s Completion for Disjunctive Logic Programs

In this paper, we introduce new semantics (that we call D3-WFS-DCOMP) and compare it with the stable semantics (STABLE). For normal programs, this semantics is based onsuitableintegration of the well-founded semantics (WFS) and the Clark’s completion. D3-WFS-DCOM has the following appealing properties: First, it agrees with STABLE in the sense that it never defines a nonminimal model or a nonminimal supported model. Second, for normal programs it extends WFS. Third, every stable model of a disjunctive programPis a D3-WFS-DCOM model ofP. Fourth, it is constructed using transformation rules accepted by STABLE. We also introduce second semantics that we call D2-WFS-DCOMP. We show that D2-WFS-DCOMP is equivalent to D3-WFS-DCOMP for normal programs but this is not the case for disjunctive programs. We also introduce third new semantics that supports the use of implicit disjunctions. We illustrate how these semantics can be extended to programs including explicit negation, default negation in the head of a clause, and aluboperator, which is a generalization of the aggregation operatorsetofover arbitrary complete lattices.

Generating Hard Random Boolean Formulas and Disjunctive Logic Programs

We propose a model of random quantified boolean formulas and their natural random disjunctive logic program counterparts. The model extends the standard models for random SAT and 2QBF. We provide theoretical bounds for the phase transition region in the new model, and show experimentally the presence of the easy-hard-easy pattern. Importantly, we show that the model is well suited for assessing solvers tuned to real-world instances. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, our model and results on random disjunctive logic programs are the first of their kind.