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Weight constraint programs with evaluable functions

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Abstract

In the current practice of Answer Set Programming (ASP), evaluable functions are represented as special kinds of relations. This often makes the resulting program unnecessarily large when instantiated over a large domain. The extra constraints needed to enforce the relation as a function also make the logic program less transparent. In this paper, we consider adding evaluable functions to answer set logic programs. The class of logic programs that we consider here is that of weight constraint programs, which are widely used in ASP. We propose an answer set semantics to these extended weight constraint programs and define loop completion to characterize the semantics. Computationally, we provide a translation from loop completions of these programs to instances of the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and use the off-the-shelf CSP solvers to compute the answer sets of these programs. A main advantage of this approach is that global constraints implemented in such CSP solvers become available to ASP. The approach also provides a new encoding for CSP problems in the style of weight constraint programs. We have implemented a prototype system based on these results, and our experiments show that this prototype system competes well with the state-of-the-art ASP solvers. In addition, we illustrate the utilities of global constraints in the ASP context.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Guizhou University, Guiyang, China

    Yisong Wang

  2. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Jia-Huai You & Li Yan Yuan

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Fangzhen Lin

  4. Guizhou Academy of Sciences, Guiyang, China

    Mingyi Zhang

Authors
  1. Yisong Wang
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  2. Jia-Huai You
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  3. Fangzhen Lin
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  4. Li Yan Yuan
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  5. Mingyi Zhang
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Correspondence to Yisong Wang.

Additional information

This is an extension of a preliminary version that appeared in the Proceedings of LPNMR’09 [43] drawing some results from [26].

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Wang, Y., You, JH., Lin, F. et al. Weight constraint programs with evaluable functions. Ann Math Artif Intell 60, 341–380 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-011-9237-y

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