Inspecting side-effects of abduction in logic programs

Abstract

In the context of abduction in Logic Programs, when finding an abductive solution for a query, one may want to check too whether some other literals become true (or false) as a consequence, strictly within the abductive solution found, that is without performing additional abductions, and without having to produce a complete model to do so. That is, such consequence literals may consume, but not produce, the abduced literals of the solution. We show how this type of reasoning requires a new mechanism, not provided by others already available. To achieve it, we present the concept of Inspection Point in Abductive Logic Programs, and show, by means of examples, how one can employ it to investigate side-effects of interest (the inspection points) in order to help choose among abductive solutions. We show how to implement inspection points on top of already existing abduction solving systems - ABDUAL and XSB-XASP - in a way that can be adopted by other systems too. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.