Embedding Circumscriptive Theories in General Disjunctive Programs

Chiaki Sakama and Katsumi Inoue

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR'95), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 928, pp. 344-357, Springer-Verlag, 1995.

Abstract

This paper presents a method of embedding circumscriptive theories in general disjunctive programs. In a general disjunctive program, negation as failure occurs not only in the body but in the head of a rule. In this setting, minimized predicates of a circumscriptive theory are specified using the negation in the body, while fixed and varying predicates are expressed by the negation in the head. Moreover, the translation implies a close relationship between circumscription and abductive logic programming. That is, fixed and varying predicates in a circumscriptive theory are also viewed as abducible predicates in an abductive disjunctive program. Our method of translating circumscription into logic programming is fairly general compared with the existing approaches and exploits new applications of logic programming for representing commonsense knowledge.

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