Abstract

We investigate the problem of reasoning with partitions of related logical axioms. Our motivation is two-fold. First, we are concerned with how to reason effectively with multiple knowledge bases that have overlap in content. Second, and more fundamentally, we are concerned with how to exploit structure inherent in a set of logical axioms to induce a partitioning of the axioms that will lead to an improvement in the efficiency of reasoning. To this end, we provide algorithms for reasoning with partitions of axioms in propositional and first-order logic. Craig’s interpolation theorem serves as a key to proving completeness of these algorithms. We analyze the computational benefit of our algorithms and detect those parameters of a partitioning that influence the efficiency of computation. These parameters are the number of symbols shared by a pair of partitions, the size of each partition, and the topology of the partitioning. Finally, we provide a greedy algorithm that automatically decomposes a given theory into partitions, exploiting the parameters that influence the efficiency of computation. 1

Citations