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Automated Termination Analysis for Logic Programs by Term Rewriting

  • Conference paper
Book cover Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4407))

Abstract

There are two kinds of approaches for termination analysis of logic programs: “transformational” and “direct” ones. Direct approaches prove termination directly on the basis of the logic program. Transformational approaches transform a logic program into a term rewrite system (TRS) and then analyze termination of the resulting TRS instead. Thus, transformational approaches make all methods previously developed for TRSs available for logic programs as well. However, the applicability of most existing transformations is quite restricted, as they can only be used for certain subclasses of logic programs. (Most of them are restricted to well-moded programs.) In this paper we improve these transformations such that they become applicable for any definite logic program. To simulate the behavior of logic programs by TRSs, we slightly modify the notion of rewriting by permitting infinite terms. We show that our transformation results in TRSs which are indeed suitable for automated termination analysis. In contrast to most other methods for termination of logic programs, our technique is also sound for logic programming without occur check, which is typically used in practice. We implemented our approach in the termination prover AProVE and successfully evaluated it on a large collection of examples.

Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgsmeinschaft DFG under grant GI 274/5-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LuFG Informatik 2, RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55, 52074 Aachen, Germany

    Peter Schneider-Kamp, Jürgen Giesl & René Thiemann

  2. Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, TU Eindhoven, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Alexander Serebrenik

Authors
  1. Peter Schneider-Kamp
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  2. Jürgen Giesl
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  3. Alexander Serebrenik
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  4. René Thiemann
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Germán Puebla

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Schneider-Kamp, P., Giesl, J., Serebrenik, A., Thiemann, R. (2007). Automated Termination Analysis for Logic Programs by Term Rewriting. In: Puebla, G. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4407. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71410-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71410-1_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71409-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71410-1

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