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On the autoepistemic reconstruction of logic programming

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Abstract

Current semantics of logic programs normally ignore thesyntactical aspects of the programs. As a result, only the meanings ofsome well-behaved programs can be captured by these semantics. In this paper however, we propose a new semantics of logic programs that can reflectsome of the syntactical behaviours of the programs. The central notion of the semantics is the concept of aneutral clause p ← A which does not affect the behaviour of p in a program. The logic that underlies the semantics is based on anintensional extension of Levesque’s autoepistemicpredicate logic. It differs from existing autoepistemic logics in that it isquantificational andconstructive. We will also compare and contrast our semantics with some well-known semantics. In particular, we will show how to capture the undefined value of a logic program without resorting to a three-valued nonmonotonic formalism. This is achieved by translating an incoherent AE logic program to a program with multiple AE extensions whose intersection can then be used to characterize the undefined value of a logic program.

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Yuejun Jiang, Ph. D.: He joined the Department of Computing at Imperial College in January 1990 when he became a research associate to Professors Barry Richards and Dov Gabbay. He acted as a research coordinator of the planning group in the Logic Programming Section. In October 1992, He further became a research associate to Professor Robert Kowalski, responsible for the meta reasoning project. Previous to Imperial College, he was a British Telecom fellow at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He received a 1st class B. Sc degree (10/1980–7/1983) and Ph. D in computing at Manchester University (10/1983–10/1986). He was also an ICL fellow at Essex University between 1987 and 1988. His main research interests are in nonmonotonic reasoning, multiagent planning, temporal reasoning, dynamic constraint solving and mata reasoning.

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Jiang, Y.J. On the autoepistemic reconstruction of logic programming. New Gener Comput 11, 107–124 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037155

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037155

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