Abduction in Logic Programming started in the late 80s, early 90s, in an attempt to extend logic programming into a framework suitable for a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence and other areas of Computer Science. This paper aims to chart out the main developments of the field over the last ten years and to take a critical view of these developments from several perspectives: logical, epistemological, computational and suitability to application. The paper attempts to expose some of the challenges and prospects for the further development of the field.

In this paper, we review recent work aimed at the application of declarative logic programming to knowledge representation in artificial intelligence. We consider exten- sions of the language of definite logic programs by classical (strong) negation, disjunc- tion, and some modal operators and show how each of the added features extends the representational power of the language.

: In this paper I outline an attempt to reconcile the traditional Artificial Intelligence notion of a logic-based rational agent with the contrary notion of a reactive agent that acts "instinctively" in response to conditions that arise in its environment. For this purpose, I will use the tools of meta-logic programming to define the observation-thought-action cycle of an agent that combines the ability to perform resource-bounded reasoning, which can be interrupted and resumed any time, with the ability to act when it is necessary. 1 Introduction The traditional notion of an intelligent agent in Artificial Intelligence is that of a rational agent that has explicit representations of its own goals and of its beliefs about the world. These beliefs typically include beliefs about the actions that the agent can perform and about the effects of those actions on the state of the world. This traditional notion of intelligent agent has been challenged in recent years by the contrary notion o...

A family of extensions of SLDNF-resolution for normal abductive programs is presented. The main difference between our approach and existing procedures is the treatment of non-ground abductive goals. A completion semantics is given and the soundness and completeness of the procedures has been proven. The research presented here, provides a simple framework of abductive procedures, in which a number of parameters can be set, in order to fit the abduction procedure to the application under consideration.

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This paper presents the framework of Abductive Constraint Logic Programming (ACLP), which integrates Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) and Constraint Logic Programming (CLP). In ACLP, the task of abduction is supported and enhanced by its non-trivial integration with constraint solving. This integration of constraint solving into abductive reasoning facilitates a general form of constructive abduction and enables the application of abduction to computationally demanding problems

Recently several authors have stressed and showed the importance of having a second kind of negation in logic programs for use in deductive databases, knowledge representation, and nonmonotonic reasoning [6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 24]. Different semantics for logic programs extended with :-negation (extended logic programs) have appeared [1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 19, 24] but, contrary to what happens with semantics for normal logic programs, there is no general comparison among them, specially in what concerns the use and meaning of the newly introduced :-negation. The goal of this paper is to contrast a variety of these semantics in what concerns their use and meaning of :-negation, and its relation to classical negation and to the default negation of normal programs, here denoted by not : To this purpose we define a parametrizeable schema to encompass and characterize a diversity of proposed semantics for extended logic programs, where the parameters are two: one the axioms AX: defin...

data types are facilitated in Godel by its type and module systems. Thus, in order to describe the meta-programming facilities of Godel, a brief account of these systems is given. Each constant, function, predicate, and proposition in a Godel program must be specified by a language declaration. The type of a variable is not declared but inferred from its context within a particular program statement. To illustrate the type system, we give the language declarations that would be required for the program in Figure 1. BASE Name. CONSTANT Tom, Jerry : Name. PREDICATE Chase : Name * Name; Cat, Mouse : Name. Note that the declaration beginning BASE indicates that Name is a base type. In the statement Chase(x,y) !- Cat(x) & Mouse(y). the variables x and y are inferred to be of type Name. Polymorphic types can also be defined in Godel. They are constructed from the base types, type variables called parameters, and type constructors. Each constructor has an arity 1 attached to it. As an...

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Our purpose is to exhibit a modular systematic method of representing non-- monotonic reasoning problems with the Well Founded Semantics WFS of extended logic programs augmented with eXplicit negation (WFSX), augmented by its Contradiction Removal Semantics (CRSX) when needed. We apply this semantics, and its contradiction removal semantics counterpart, to represent non-monotonic reasoning problems. We show how to cast in the language of logic programs extended with explicit negation such forms of non-monotonic reasoning as defeasible reasoning, abductive reasoning and hypothetical reasoning and apply them to such different domains of knowledge representation as hierarchies and reasoning about actions. We then abstract a modular systematic method of representing non-monotonic problems in a logic programming semantics comprising two forms of negation avoiding some drawbacks of other proposals, with which we relate our work.