Dynamic Consistency Checking in Goal-Directed Answer Set Programming

TL;DR

This paper presents a dynamic consistency checking technique for goal-directed answer set programming that efficiently tests only relevant constraints, enabling querying of inconsistent knowledgebases while ensuring correctness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamic consistency checking method that improves the efficiency of goal-directed answer set computation by focusing on relevant constraints.

Findings

Allows querying of inconsistent knowledgebases

Guarantees partial answers are subsets of some consistent answer set

Enhances goal-directed answer set programming efficiency

Abstract

In answer set programming, inconsistencies arise when the constraints placed on a program become unsatisfiable. In this paper, we introduce a technique for dynamic consistency checking for our goal-directed method for computing answer sets, under which only those constraints deemed relevant to the partial answer set are tested, allowing inconsistent knowledgebases to be successfully queried. However, the algorithm guarantees that, if a program has at least one consistent answer set, any partial answer set returned will be a subset of some consistent answer set. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).