Courteous Logic Programs: Prioritized Conflict Handling for Rules

        We define courteous logic programs, an expressive superclass of general logic programs, for the acyclic case. Courteous LP's feature not only classical negation as in extended LP's (Gelfond & Lifschitz), but also prioritized conflict handling. We show courteous LP's always have a consistent and unique answer set, which can be computed in O(m^{2}) time, where m is the size of the ground-instantiated program, as compared to O(m) time for general LP's. Courteous LP's provide a method to resolve conflicts that arise in authoring (specifying), updating, and merging. This is especially useful for creation of rule-based intelligent agents by non-technical authors, e.g., for commercial applications such as personalized information filtering and workflow. Current work includes: implementing courteous LP's for such applications, in IBM's RAISE system; generalizing expressively, e.g., to permit recursion; and developing methods for interactive acquisition of rules, e.g., conflict analysis and inter-agent communication.

        Publication Info: This report is an extended version of ``Prioritized Conflict Handling for Logic Programs'' in Proceedings of International Logic Programming Symposium, MIT Press 1997.

By: Benjamin N. Grosof

Published in: RC20836 in 1997

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