This paper focuses on computing general first-order parallel and prioritized circumscription with varying constants. We propose linear translations from general first-order circumscription to first-order theories under stable model semantics over arbitrary structures, including Tr_v for parallel circumscription and Tr^s_v for conjunction of parallel circumscriptions (further for prioritized circumscription). To improve the efficiency, we give an optimization \Gamma_{\exists} to reduce logic programs in size when eliminating existential quantifiers during the translations. Based on these results, a general first-order circumscription solver, named cfo2lp, is developed by calling answer set programming (ASP) solvers. Using circuit diagnosis problem and extended stable marriage problem as benchmarks, we compare cfo2lp with a propositional circumscription solver circ2dlp and an ASP solver with complex optimization metasp on efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that for problems represented by first-order circumscription naturally and intuitively, cfo2lp can compute all solutions over finite structures. We also apply our approach to description logics with circumscription and repairs in inconsistent databases, which can be handled effectively.

Answer set programs (ASP) with external evaluations are a declarative means to capture advanced applications. However, their evaluation can be expensive due to external source accesses. In this paper we consider HEX-programs that provide external atoms as a bidirectional interface to external sources and present a novel evaluation method based on support sets, which informally are portions of the input to an external atom that will determine its output for any completion of the partial input. Support sets allow one to shortcut the external source access, which can be completely eliminated. This is particularly attractive if a compact representation of suitable support sets is efficiently constructible. We discuss some applications with this property, among them description logic programs over DL-Lite ontologies, and present experimental results showing that support sets can significantly improve efficiency.

Understanding biological pathways is an important activity in the biological domain for drug development. Due to the parallelism and complexity inherent in pathways, computer models that can answer queries about pathways are needed. A researcher may ask `what-if' questions comparing alternate scenarios, that require deeper understanding of the underlying model. In this paper, we present overview of such a system we developed and an English-like high level language to express pathways and queries. Our language is inspired by high level action and query languages and it uses Petri Net execution semantics.

We report on a project aiming at developing a system that solves a wide range of math problems written in natural language. In the system, formal analysis of natural language semantics is coupled with automated reasoning technologies including computer algebra, using logic as their common language. We have developed a prototype system that accepts as its input a linguistically annotated problem text. Using the prototype system as a reference point, we analyzed real university entrance examination problems from the viewpoint of end-to-end automated reasoning. Further, evaluation on entrance exam mock tests revealed that an optimistic estimate of the system’s performance already matches human averages on a few test sets.

The area of cognitive robotics is often subject to the criticism that the proposals investigated in the literature are too far removed from the kind of continuous uncertainty and noise seen in actual real-world robotics. This paper proposes a new language and an implemented system, called PREGO, based on the situation calculus, that is able to reason effectively about degrees of belief against noisy sensors and effectors in continuous domains. It embodies the representational richness of conventional logic-based action languages, such as context-sensitive successor state axioms, but is still shown to be efficient using a number of empirical evaluations. We believe that PREGO is a powerful framework for exploring real-time reactivity and an interesting bridge between logic and probability for cognitive robotics applications.

We contend that ethically significant behavior of autonomous systems should be guided by explicit ethical principles determined through a consensus of ethicists. To provide assistance in developing these ethical principles, we have developed GenEth, a general ethical dilemma analyzer that, through a dialog with ethicists, codifies ethical principles in any given domain. GenEth has been used to codify principles in a number of domains pertinent to the behavior of autonomous systems and these principles have been verified using an Ethical Turing Test.

This paper presents a semi-automated methodology for generating geometric proof problems of the kind found in a high-school curriculum. We formalize the notion of a geometry proof problem and describe an algorithm for generating such problems over a user-provided figure. Our experimental results indicate that our problem generation algorithm can effectively generate proof problems in elementary geometry. On a corpus of 110 figures taken from popular geometry textbooks, our system generated an average of about 443 problems per figure in an average time of 4.7 seconds per figure.

The action programming language GOLOG has been found useful for the control of autonomous agents such as mobile robots. In scenarios like these, tasks are often open-ended so that the respective control programs are non-terminating. Before deploying such programs on a robot, it is often desirable to verify that they meet certain requirements. For this purpose, Claßen and Lakemeyer recently introduced algorithms for the verification of temporal properties of GOLOG programs. However, given the expressiveness of GOLOG, their verification procedures are not guaranteed to terminate. In this paper, we show how decidability can be obtained by suitably restricting the underlying base logic, the effect axioms for primitive actions, and the use of actions within GOLOG programs. Moreover, we show that dropping any of these restrictions immediately leads to undecidability of the verification problem.

Recent advances in Programming by Example (PBE) have supported new applications to text editing, but existing approaches are limited to simple text strings. In this paper we address transformations in richly formatted documents, using an approach based on the idea of least general generalizations from inductive inference, which avoids the scalability issues faced by state-of-the-art PBE methods. We describe a novel domain specific language (DSL) that expresses transformations over XML structures describing richly formatted content, and a synthesis algorithm that generates a minimal program with respect to a natural subsumption ordering in our DSL. We present experimental results on tasks collected from online help forums, showing an average of 4.17 examples required for task completion.

The notions of loops and loop formulas play an important role in answer set computation. However, there would be an exponential number of loops in the worst case. Gebser and Schaub characterized a subclass elementary loops and showed that they are sufficient for selecting answer sets from models of a logic program. This paper proposes an alternative definition of elementary loops and identify a subclass of elementary loops, called proper loops. By applying a special form of their loop formulas, proper loops are also sufficient for the SAT-based answer set computation. A polynomial algorithm to recognize a proper loop is given and shows that for certain logic programs, identifying all proper loops of a program is more efficient than that of elementary loops. Furthermore, we prove that, by considering the structure of the positive body-head dependency graph of a program, a large number of loops could be ignored for identifying proper loops. We provide another algorithm for identifying all proper loops of a program. The experiments show that, for certain programs whose dependency graphs consisting of sets of components that are densely connected inside and sparsely connected outside, the new algorithm is more efficient.