Term Rewriting Systems play an important role in various areas, such as abstract data type specifications, implementations of functional programming languages and automated deduction. In this chapter we introduce several of the basic comcepts and facts for TRS's. Specifically, we discuss Abstract Reduction Systems

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A drawback which concept languages based on kl-one have is that all the terminological knowledge has to be defined on an abstract logical level. In many applications, one would like to be able to refer to concrete domains and predicates on these domains when defining concepts. Examples for such concrete domains are the integers, the real numbers, or also non-arithmetic domains, and predicates could be equality, inequality, or more complex predicates. In the present paper we shall propose a scheme for integrating such concrete domains into concept languages rather than describing a particular extension by some specific concrete domain. We shall define a terminological and an assertional language, and consider the important inference problems such as subsumption, instantiation, and consistency. The formal semantics as well as the reasoning algorithms are given on the scheme level. In contrast to existing kl-one based systems, these algorithms will be not only sound but also complete. The...

We describe a novel logic, called HiLog, and show that it provides a more suitable basis for logic programming than does traditional predicate logic. HiLog has a higher-order syntax and allows arbitrary terms to appear in places where predicates, functions and atomic formulas occur in predicate calculus. But its semantics is first-order and admits a sound and complete proof procedure. Applications of HiLog are discussed, including DCG grammars, higher-order and modular logic programming, and deductive databases.

We describe rippling: a tactic for the heuristic control of the key part of proofs by mathematical induction. This tactic significantly reduces the search for a proof of a wide variety of inductive theorems. We first present a basic version of rippling, followed by various extensions which are necessary to capture larger classes of inductive proofs. Finally, we present a generalised form of rippling which embodies these extensions as special cases. We prove that generalised rippling always terminates, and we discuss the implementation of the tactic and its relation with other inductive proof search heuristics.

SDF is a formalism for the definition of syntax which is comparable to BNF in some respect, but has a wider scope in that it also covers the definition...

We present an "unfailing" extension of the standard KnuthBendix completion procedure that is guaranteed to produce a desired canonical system, provided certain conditions are met. Weprove that this unfailing completion method is refutationally complete for theorem proving in equational theories. The method can also be applied to Horn clauses with equality, in which case it corresponds to positive unit resolution plus oriented paramodulation, with unrestricted simplification.

this paper we introduce the notion of a monotone algebra as the natural concept for semantical methods. Though we focus on `pure' TRS, the ideas are easily extended to conditional TRS, typed TRS and TRS modulo equations. We propose a classification of types of termination based upon the types of orderings of the underlying monotone algebras. Some remarks and examples are not claimed to be new but are included for completeness and for illustrating the setting of monotone algebras.

The control of polyvariance is a key issue in partial deduction of logic programs. Certainly, only finitely many specialised versions of any procedure should be generated, while, on the other hand, overly severe limitations should not be imposed. In this paper, well-founded orderings serve as a starting point for tackling this so-called "global termination" problem. Polyvariance is determined by the set of distinct "partially deduced" atoms generated during partial deduction. Avoiding ad-hoc techniques, we formulate a quite general framework where this set is represented as a tree structure. Associating weights with nodes, we define a well-founded order among such structures, thus obtaining a foundation for certified global termination of partial deduction. We include an algorithm template, concrete instances of which can be used in actual implementations, prove termination and correctness, and report on the results of some experiments. Finally, we conjecture that the proposed framewor...

Notallqueries inrelational calculus can beanswered sensibly when disjunction, negation, and universal quantification are allowed, The class of relation calculus queries or formulas that have sensible answers is called the domam independent class which is known to be undecidable. Subsequent research has focused on identifying large decidable subclasses of domain independent formulas. In this paper we investigate the properties of two such classes: the et,aluable formulas and the allowed formulas. Although both classes have been defined before, we give simplified definitions, present short proofs of their main properties, and describe a method to incorporate equality. Although evaluable queries have sensible answers, it is not straightforward to compute them efficiently or correctly, We introduce relational algebra normal form for formulas from which form the correct translation into relational algebra istrivlal. We give algorithms to transform anevaluable formula into an equivalent allowed formula and from there into relational algebra normal form, Our algorithms avoid use of the so-called Dom relation, consisting of all constants appearing in the database or the query. Finally, we describe a restriction under which every domain independent formula is evaluable