Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established formalism for logic programming. Problem solving in ASP requires to write an ASP program whose answers sets correspond to solutions. Albeit the non-existence of answer sets for some ASP programs can be considered as a modeling feature, it turns out to be a weakness in many other cases, and especially for query answering. Paracoherent answer set semantics extend the classical semantics of ASP to draw meaningful conclusions also from incoherent programs, with the result of increasing the range of applications of ASP. State of the art implementations of paracoherent ASP adopt the semi-equilibrium semantics, but cannot be lifted straightforwardly to compute efficiently the (better) split semi-equilibrium semantics that discards undesirable semi-equilibrium models. In this paper an efficient evaluation technique for computing a split semi-equilibrium model is presented. An experiment on hard benchmarks shows that better paracoherent answer sets can be computed consuming less computational resources than existing methods. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning.While incoherence, the non-existence of answer sets for some programs, is an important feature of ASP, it has frequently been criticised and indeed has some disadvantages, especially for query answering.Paracoherent semantics have been suggested as a remedy, which extend the classical notion of answer sets to draw meaningful conclusions also from incoherent programs. In this paper we present an alternative characterization of the two major paracoherent semantics in terms of (extended) externally supported models. This definition uses a transformation of ASP programs that is more parsimonious than the classic epistemic transformation used in recent implementations.A performance comparison carried out on benchmarks from ASP competitions shows that the usage of the new transformation brings about performance improvements that are independent of the underlying algorithms.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning. An ASP program can have no answer set due to cyclic default negation. In this case, it is not possible to draw any conclusion, even if this is not intended. Recently, several paracoherent semantics have been proposed that address this issue,and several potential applications for these semantics have been identified. However, paracoherent semantics have essentially been inapplicable in practice, due to the lack of efficient algorithms and implementations. In this paper, this lack is addressed, and several different algorithms to compute semi-stable and semi-equilibrium models are proposed and implemented into an answer set solving framework. An empirical performance comparison among the new algorithms on benchmarks from ASP competitions is given as well.

We study the problem of reasoning from incoherent answer set programs, i.e., from logic programs that do not have an answer set due to cyclic dependencies of an atom from its default negation. As a starting point we consider so-called semi-stable models which have been developed for this purpose building on a program transformation, called epistemic transformation. We give a model-theoretic characterization of this semantics, considering pairs of two-valued interpretations of the original program, rather than resorting to its epistemic transformation. Moreover, we show some anomalies of semi-stable semantics with respect to basic epistemic properties and propose an alternative semantics satisfying these properties. In addition to a model-theoretic and a transformational characterization of the alternative semantics, we prove precise complexity results for main reasoning tasks under both semantics.