Abstract
The near-Horn Prolog procedures have been proposed as effective procedures in the area of disjunctive logic programming, an extension of logic programming to the (first-order) non-Horn clause domain. In this paper, we show that these case-analysis based procedures may be viewed as members of a class of procedures called the “ancestry family”, which also includes Model Elimination (and its variants), the Positive Refinement of Model Elimination, and SLWV-resolution. The common feature which binds these procedures is the extension of SLD-resolution to full first-order logic with the addition of an ancestor cancellation rule. Procedures in the ancestry family are all sound and complete first-order procedures that can be seen to vary along three parameters: (1) the number of clause contrapositives required, (2) the amount of ancestor checking that must occur, and (3) the use (if any) of a Restart rule. Using a sequent-style presentation format for all procedures, we highlight the close relationships among these procedures and compare their relative advantage.
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This research was partially supported by NSF Grants CCR-8900383 and CCR-9116203.
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Reed, D.W., Loveland, D.W. Near-Horn Prolog and the ancestry family of procedures. Ann Math Artif Intell 14, 225–249 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01530821
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01530821