Non-Termination of Logic Programs Using Patterns

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pattern-based approach to detect non-termination in logic programs, adapting techniques from term rewriting and implementing an experimental tool for evaluation.

Contribution

It adapts pattern-based non-termination detection from term rewriting to logic programming with a new unfolding technique and provides an experimental tool for validation.

Findings

Effective detection of non-termination patterns in logic programs

Implementation of the NTI tool demonstrating practical applicability

Identification of infinite rewrite sequences through pattern analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we consider an approach introduced in term rewriting for the automatic detection of non-looping non-termination from patterns of rules. We adapt it to logic programming by defining a new unfolding technique that produces patterns describing possibly infinite sets of finite rewrite sequences. We present an experimental evaluation of our contributions that we implemented in our tool NTI.