Incremental Answer Set Programming with Overgrounding

TL;DR

This paper introduces an incremental grounding method for answer set programming that efficiently reuses ground logic programs across similar inputs, significantly speeding up repeated reasoning tasks in applications like stream reasoning.

Contribution

It presents a novel incremental grounding approach that simplifies and accelerates repeated logic program grounding without requiring detailed control of grounding engines.

Findings

The approach enables faster grounding in repeated reasoning scenarios.

It reduces effort needed to update ground programs with new inputs.

Experimental results demonstrate improved efficiency in practical applications.

Abstract

Repeated executions of reasoning tasks for varying inputs are necessary in many applicative settings, such as stream reasoning. In this context, we propose an incremental grounding approach for the answer set semantics. We focus on the possibility of generating incrementally larger ground logic programs equivalent to a given non-ground one; so called overgrounded programs can be reused in combination with deliberately many different sets of inputs. Updating overgrounded programs requires a small effort, thus making the instantiation of logic programs considerably faster when grounding is repeated on a series of inputs similar to each other. Notably, the proposed approach works "under the hood", relieving designers of logic programs from controlling technical aspects of grounding engines and answer set systems. In this work we present the theoretical basis of the proposed incremental grounding technique, we illustrate the consequent repeated evaluation strategy and report about our experiments. This paper is under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).