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 Logic & Formal Reasoning


Planning in Action Language BC while Learning Action Costs for Mobile Robots

AAAI Conferences

The action language BC provides an elegant way of formalizing dynamic domains which involve indirect effects of actions and recursively defined fluents. In complex robot task planning domains, it may be necessary for robots to plan with incomplete information, and reason about indirect or recursive action effects. In this paper, we demonstrate how BC can be used for robot task planning to solve these issues. Additionally, action costs are incorporated with planning to produce optimal plans, and we estimate these costs from experience making planning adaptive. This paper presents the first application of BC on a real robot in a realistic domain, which involves human-robot interaction for knowledge acquisition, optimal plan generation to minimize navigation time, and learning for adaptive planning.


The Design of the Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming that has been developed in the field of logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. Advances in ASP solving technology are customarily assessed in competition events, as it happens for other closely-related problem-solving technologies like SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling. ASP Competitions are (usually) biennial events; however, the Fifth ASP Competition departs from tradition, in order to join the FLoC Olympic Games at the Vienna Summer of Logic 2014, which is expected to be the largest event in the history of logic. This edition of the ASP Competition series is jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the Aalto University (Finland), and the University of Genova (Italy), and is affiliated with the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014). It features a completely re-designed setup, with novelties involving the design of tracks, the scoring schema, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. Benchmark domains are taken from past editions, and best system packages submitted in 2013 are compared with new versions and solvers. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).


MaLeS: A Framework for Automatic Tuning of Automated Theorem Provers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

MaLeS is an automatic tuning framework for automated theorem provers. It provides solutions for both the strategy finding as well as the strategy scheduling problem. This paper describes the tool and the methods used in it, and evaluates its performance on three automated theorem provers: E, LEO-II and Satallax. An evaluation on a subset of the TPTP library problems shows that on average a MaLeS-tuned prover solves 8.67% more problems than the prover with its default settings.


BliStr: The Blind Strategymaker

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

BliStr is a system that automatically develops strategies for E prover on a large set of problems. The main idea is to interleave (i) iterated low-timelimit local search for new strategies on small sets of similar easy problems with (ii) higher-timelimit evaluation of the new strategies on all problems. The accummulated results of the global higher-timelimit runs are used to define and evolve the notion of "similar easy problems", and to control the selection of the next strategy to be improved. The technique was used to significantly strengthen the set of E strategies used by the MaLARea, PS-E, E-MaLeS, and E systems in the CASC@Turing 2012 competition, particularly in the Mizar division. Similar improvement was obtained on the problems created from the Flyspeck corpus.


Lectures on Jacques Herbrand as a Logician

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We give some lectures on the work on formal logic of Jacques Herbrand, and sketch his life and his influence on automated theorem proving. The intended audience ranges from students interested in logic over historians to logicians. Besides the well-known correction of Herbrand's False Lemma by Goedel and Dreben, we also present the hardly known unpublished correction of Heijenoort and its consequences on Herbrand's Modus Ponens Elimination. Besides Herbrand's Fundamental Theorem and its relation to the Loewenheim-Skolem-Theorem, we carefully investigate Herbrand's notion of intuitionism in connection with his notion of falsehood in an infinite domain. We sketch Herbrand's two proofs of the consistency of arithmetic and his notion of a recursive function, and last but not least, present the correct original text of his unification algorithm with a new translation.


Knowledge Forgetting in Answer Set Programming

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

The ability of discarding or hiding irrelevant information has been recognized as an important feature for knowledge based systems, including answer set programming. The notion of strong equivalence in answer set programming plays an important role for different problems as it gives rise to a substitution principle and amounts to knowledge equivalence of logic programs. In this paper, we uniformly propose a semantic knowledge forgetting, called HT- and FLP-forgetting, for logic programs under stable model and FLP-stable model semantics, respectively. Our proposed knowledge forgetting discards exactly the knowledge of a logic program which is relevant to forgotten variables. Thus it preserves strong equivalence in the sense that strongly equivalent logic programs will remain strongly equivalent after forgetting the same variables. We show that this semantic forgetting result is always expressible; and we prove a representation theorem stating that the HT- and FLP-forgetting can be precisely characterized by Zhang-Zhou's four forgetting postulates under the HT- and FLP-model semantics, respectively. We also reveal underlying connections between the proposed forgetting and the forgetting of propositional logic, and provide complexity results for decision problems in relation to the forgetting. An application of the proposed forgetting is also considered in a conflict solving scenario.


Minimum Model Semantics for Extensional Higher-order Logic Programming with Negation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Extensional higher-order logic programming has been introduced as a generalization of classical logic programming. An important characteristic of this paradigm is that it preserves all the well-known properties of traditional logic programming. In this paper we consider the semantics of negation in the context of the new paradigm. Using some recent results from non-monotonic fixed-point theory, we demonstrate that every higher-order logic program with negation has a unique minimum infinite-valued model. In this way we obtain the first purely model-theoretic semantics for negation in extensional higher-order logic programming. Using our approach, we resolve an old paradox that was introduced by W. W. Wadge in order to demonstrate the semantic difficulties of higher-order logic programming.


Contextual Abductive Reasoning with Side-Effects

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The belief bias effect is a phenomenon which occurs when we think that we judge an argument based on our reasoning, but are actually influenced by our beliefs and prior knowledge. Evans, Barston and Pollard carried out a psychological syllogistic reasoning task to prove this effect. Participants were asked whether they would accept or reject a given syllogism. We discuss one specific case which is commonly assumed to be believable but which is actually not logically valid. By introducing abnormalities, abduction and background knowledge, we adequately model this case under the weak completion semantics. Our formalization reveals new questions about possible extensions in abductive reasoning. For instance, observations and their explanations might include some relevant prior abductive contextual information concerning some side-effect or leading to a contestable or refutable side-effect. A weaker notion indicates the support of some relevant consequences by a prior abductive context. Yet another definition describes jointly supported relevant consequences, which captures the idea of two observations containing mutually supportive side-effects. Though motivated with and exemplified by the running psychology application, the various new general abductive context definitions are introduced here and given a declarative semantics for the first time, and have a much wider scope of application. Inspection points, a concept introduced by Pereira and Pinto, allows us to express these definitions syntactically and intertwine them into an operational semantics.


Vicious Circle Principle and Logic Programs with Aggregates

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The paper presents a knowledge representation language $\mathcal{A}log$ which extends ASP with aggregates. The goal is to have a language based on simple syntax and clear intuitive and mathematical semantics. We give some properties of $\mathcal{A}log$, an algorithm for computing its answer sets, and comparison with other approaches.


Querying Geometric Figures Using a Controlled Language, Ontological Graphs and Dependency Lattices

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Dynamic geometry systems (DGS) have become basic tools in many areas of geometry as, for example, in education. Geometry Automated Theorem Provers (GATP) are an active area of research and are considered as being basic tools in future enhanced educational software as well as in a next generation of mechanized mathematics assistants. Recently emerged Web repositories of geometric knowledge, like TGTP and Intergeo, are an attempt to make the already vast data set of geometric knowledge widely available. Considering the large amount of geometric information already available, we face the need of a query mechanism for descriptions of geometric constructions. In this paper we discuss two approaches for describing geometric figures (declarative and procedural), and present algorithms for querying geometric figures in declaratively and procedurally described corpora, by using a DGS or a dedicated controlled natural language for queries.