Martin Slota

João Leite, Martin Slota

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a considerable effort devoted to the problem of updating logic programs under the stable model semantics (a.k.a. answer-set programs) or, in other words, the problem of characterising the result of bringing up-to-date a logic program when the world it describes changes. Whereas the state-of-the-art approaches are guided by the same basic intuitions and aspirations as belief updates in the context of classical logic, they build upon fundamentally different principles and methods, which have prevented a unifying framework that could embrace both belief and rule updates. In this paper, we will overview some of the main approaches and results related to answer-set programming updates, while pointing out some of the main challenges that research in this topic has faced.

Martin Slota, Joao Leite

Existing methods for dealing with knowledge updates differ greatly depending on the underlying knowledge representation formalism. When Classical Logic is used, updates are typically performed by manipulating the knowledge base on the model-theoretic level. On the opposite side of the spectrum stand the semantics for updating Answer-Set Programs that need to rely on rule syntax. Yet, a unifying perspective that could embrace both these branches of research is of great importance as it enables a deeper understanding of all involved methods and principles and creates room for their cross-fertilisation, ripening and further development. This paper bridges the seemingly irreconcilable approaches to updates. It introduces a novel monotonic characterisation of rules, dubbed RE-models, and shows it to be a more suitable semantic foundation for rule updates than SE-models. Then it proposes a generic scheme for specifying semantic rule update operators, based on the idea of viewing a program as the set of sets of RE-models of its rules; updates are performed by introducing additional interpretations - exceptions - to the sets of RE-models of rules in the original program. The introduced scheme is used to define rule update operators that are closely related to both classical update principles and traditional approaches to rules updates, and serve as a basis for a solution to the long-standing problem of state condensing, showing how they can be equivalently defined as binary operators on some class of logic programs. Finally, the essence of these ideas is extracted to define an abstract framework for exception-based update operators, viewing a knowledge base as the set of sets of models of its elements, which can capture a wide range of both model- and formula-based classical update operators, and thus serves as the first firm formal ground connecting classical and rule updates.

Martin Slota, Martin Baláz, João Leite

Existing semantics for answer-set program updates fall into two categories: either they consider only strong negation in heads of rules, or they primarily rely on default negation in heads of rules and optionally provide support for strong negation by means of a syntactic transformation. In this paper we pinpoint the limitations of both these approaches and argue that both types of negation should be first-class citizens in the context of updates. We identify principles that plausibly constrain their interaction but are not simultaneously satisfied by any existing rule update semantics. Then we extend one of the most advanced semantics with direct support for strong negation and show that it satisfies the outlined principles as well as a variety of other desirable properties.

Martin Slota, João Leite

Logic programs under the stable model semantics, or answer-set programs, provide an expressive rule-based knowledge representation framework, featuring a formal, declarative and well-understood semantics. However, handling the evolution of rule bases is still a largely open problem. The AGM framework for belief change was shown to give inappropriate results when directly applied to logic programs under a non-monotonic semantics such as the stable models. The approaches to address this issue, developed so far, proposed update semantics based on manipulating the syntactic structure of programs and rules. More recently, AGM revision has been successfully applied to a significantly more expressive semantic characterisation of logic programs based on SE-models. This is an important step, as it changes the focus from the evolution of a syntactic representation of a rule base to the evolution of its semantic content. In this paper, we borrow results from the area of belief update to tackle the problem of updating (instead of revising) answer-set programs. We prove a representation theorem which makes it possible to constructively define any operator satisfying a set of postulates derived from Katsuno and Mendelzon's postulates for belief update. We define a specific operator based on this theorem, examine its computational complexity and compare the behaviour of this operator with syntactic rule update semantics from the literature. Perhaps surprisingly, we uncover a serious drawback of all rule update operators based on Katsuno and Mendelzon's approach to update and on SE-models.