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Computing preferred answer sets by meta-interpretation in Answer Set Programming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2003

THOMAS EITER
Affiliation:
Institut für Informationssysteme 184/3, TU Wien Favoritenstr. 9-11, 1040 Wien, Austria (e-mail: eiter@kr.tuwien.ac.at)
WOLFGANG FABER
Affiliation:
Institut für Informationssysteme 184/3, TU Wien Favoritenstr. 9-11, 1040 Wien, Austria (e-mail: faber@kr.tuwien.ac.at)
NICOLA LEONE
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Calabria 87030 Rende (CS), Italy (e-mail: leone@unical.it)
GERALD PFEIFER
Affiliation:
Institut für Informationssysteme 184/2, TU Wien Favoritenstr. 9-11, 1040 Wien, Austria (e-mail: pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at)

Abstract

Most recently, Answer Set Programming (ASP) has been attracting interest as a new paradigm for problem solving. An important aspect, for which several approaches have been presented, is the handling of preferences between rules. In this paper, we consider the problem of implementing preference handling approaches by means of meta-interpreters in Answer Set Programming. In particular, we consider the preferred answer set approaches by Brewka and Eiter, by Delgrande, Schaub and Tompits, and by Wang, Zhou and Lin. We present suitable meta-interpreters for these semantics using DLV, which is an efficient engine for ASP. Moreover, we also present a meta-interpreter for the weakly preferred answer set approach by Brewka and Eiter, which uses the weak constraint feature of DLV as a tool for expressing and solving an underlying optimization problem. We also consider advanced meta-interpreters, which make use of graph-based characterizations and often allow for more efficient computations. Our approach shows the suitability of ASP in general and of DLV in particular for fast prototyping. This can be fruitfully exploited for experimenting with new languages and knowledge-representation formalisms.

Type
Regular Papers
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper is a revised and extended version of a preliminary paper in: Alessandro Provetti and Tran Cao Son, editors, Proceedings AAAI 2001 Spring Symposium on Answer Set Programming: Towards Efficient and Scalable Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Stanford CA, March 2001, AAAI Press.