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Renaming a set of non-Horn clauses

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Abstract

Several extensions of the logic programming language Prolog to non-Horn clauses use case anlaysis to handle non-Horn clauses. In this paper, analytical and empirical evidences are presented to show that, by making a set of clauses less “non-Horn” using predicate renaming, the performance- of these case-analysis based procedures can be improved significantly. In addition, the paper also investigated the problem of efficiently constructing a predicate renaming that reduces the degree of “non-Hornness” of a clause set maximally. It is shown that this problem of finding a predicate renaming to achieve minimal “non-Hornness” is NP-complete.

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Correspondence to Nie Xumin.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 10th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligence Systems, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, October 1997.

NIE Xumin was born in 1962. He received his B.S. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1982, his M.S. degree from Temple University in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989, all in computer science. He was a research associate at the State University of New York at Albany from 1990 to 1992. He served on the faculty of Wichita State University, Kansas from 1994 to 1997 as an assistant professor. Currently Dr. Nie is on the technical staff of Oracle Corporation. His research interests are in the area of computer system performance, automated reasoning and logic programming.

GUO Qing received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. In 1997 he received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Albany. He is currently with GTE Labs, Waltham, Massachusetts. His research interests include automated deduction, telecommunication network management and distributed object computing.

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Nie, X., Guo, Q. Renaming a set of non-Horn clauses. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 15, 409–415 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02950403

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02950403

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