Program specialisation aims at improving the overall performance of programs by performing source to source transformations. A common approach within functional and logic programming, known respectively as partial evaluation and partial deduction, is to exploit partial knowledge about the input. It is achieved through a well-automated application of parts of the Burstall-Darlington unfold/fold transformation framework. The main challenge in developing systems is to design automatic control that ensures correctness, efficiency, and termination. This survey and tutorial presents the main developments in controlling partial deduction over the past 10 years and analyses their respective merits and shortcomings. It ends with an assessment of current achievements and sketches some remaining research challenges.
The so called ``cogen approach'' to program specialisation, writing a compiler generator instead of a specialiser, has been used with considerable success in partial evaluation of both functional and imperative languages. This paper demonstrates that the cogen approach is also applicable to the specialisation of logic programs (also called partial deduction) and leads to effective specialisers. Moreover, using good binding-time annotations, the speed-ups of the specialised programs are comparable to the speed-ups obtained with online specialisers. The paper first develops a generic approach to…
Binary logic programs can be obtained from ordinary logic programs by a binarizing transformation. In most cases, binary programs obtained this way are less efficient than the original programs. (Demoen, 1992) showed an interesting example of a logic program whose computational behaviour was improved when it was transformed to a binary program and then specialized by partial deduction. The class of B-stratifiable logic programs is defined. It is shown that for every B-stratifiable logic program, binarization and subsequent partial deduction produce a binary program which does not contain varia…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Entity alignment (EA) for knowledge graphs (KGs) plays a critical role in knowledge engineering. Existing EA methods mostly focus on utilizing the graph structures and entity attributes (including literals), but ignore images that are common in modern multi-modal KGs. In this study we first constructed Multi-OpenEA -- eight large-scale, image-equipped EA benchmarks, and then evaluated some existing embedding-based methods for utilizing images. In view of the complementary nature of visual modal information and logical deduction, we further developed a new multi-modal EA method named LODEME usi…
In this paper an approach to automated deduction under uncertainty,based on possibilistic logic, is proposed ; for that purpose we deal with clauses weighted by a degree which is a lower bound of a necessity or a possibility measure, according to the nature of the uncertainty. Two resolution rules are used for coping with the different situations, and the refutation method can be generalized. Besides the lower bounds are allowed to be functions of variables involved in the clause, which gives hypothetical reasoning capabilities. The relation between our approach and the idea of minimizing abno…
Extended Triangular Method: A Generalized Algorithm for Contradiction Separation Based Automated Deduction
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；National-Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of System Credibility Automatic Verification, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学系统可信性自动验证国家地方联合工程实验室）；Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；Jiangxi University of Science and Technology（江西理工大学）
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
The tension between deduction and induction is perhaps the most fundamental issue in areas such as philosophy, cognition and artificial intelligence (AI). The deduction camp concerns itself with questions about the expressiveness of formal languages for capturing knowledge about the world, together with proof systems for reasoning from such knowledge bases. The learning camp attempts to generalize from examples about partial descriptions about the world. In AI, historically, these camps have loosely divided the development of the field, but advances in cross-over areas such as statistical rela…
My research goal is to employ a parser generation algorithm based on the Earley parsing algorithm to the evaluation and compilation of queries to logic programs, especially to deductive databases. By means of partial deduction, from a query to a logic program a parameterized automaton is to be generated that models the evaluation of this query. This automaton can be compiled to executable code; thus we expect a speedup in runtime of query evaluation. An extended abstract/ full version of a paper accepted to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium of the 30th International Conference on Logic P…
The 7th International Workshop on Theorem proving components for Educational software (ThEdu'18) was held in Oxford, United Kingdom, on 18 July 2018. It was associated to the conference, Federated Logic Conference 2018 (FLoC2018). The major aim of the ThEdu workshop series was to link developers interested in adapting Computer Theorem Proving (TP) to the needs of education and to inform mathematicians and mathematics educators about TP's potential for educational software. Topics of interest include: methods of automated deduction applied to checking students' input; methods of automated deduc…
Automated Deduction in Geometry (ADG) is a forum to exchange ideas and views, to present research results and progress, and to demonstrate software tools at the intersection between geometry and automated deduction. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to): polynomial algebra, invariant and coordinate-free methods; probabilistic, synthetic, and logic approaches, techniques for automated geometric reasoning from discrete mathematics, combinatorics, and numerics; interactive theorem proving in geometry; symbolic and numeric methods for geometric computation, geometric constraint solving,…
We study conjunctive partial deduction, an advanced specialization technique aimed at improving the performance of logic programs, in the context of relational programming language miniKanren. We identify a number of issues, caused by miniKanren peculiarities, and describe a novel approach to specialization based on partial deduction and supercompilation. The results of the evaluation demonstrate successful specialization of relational interpreters. Although the project is at an early stage, we consider it as the first step towards an efficient optimization framework for miniKanren.
The relationship between abstract interpretation and partial deduction has received considerable attention and (partial) integrations have been proposed starting from both the partial deduction and abstract interpretation perspectives. In this work we present what we argue is the first fully described generic algorithm for efficient and precise integration of abstract interpretation and partial deduction. Taking as starting point state-of-the-art algorithms for context-sensitive, polyvariant abstract interpretation and (abstract) partial deduction, we present an algorithm which combines the be…
We study the notion of binding-time analysis for logic programs. We formalise the unfolding aspect of an on-line partial deduction system as a Prolog program. Using abstract interpretation, we collect information about the run-time behaviour of the program. We use this information to make the control decisions about the unfolding at analysis time and to turn the on-line system into an off-line system. We report on some initial experiments.
This work-in-progress focuses on the refinement of application of the intensional logic to cyberforensic analysis and its benefits are compared with the finite-state automata approach. This work extends the use of the scientific intensional programming paradigm onto modeling and implementation of a cyberforensics investigation process with the backtrace of event reconstruction, modeling the evidence as multidimensional hierarchical contexts, and proving or disproving the claims with it in the intensional manner of evaluation. This is a practical, context-aware improvement over the finite state…
We investigate representations of imperative programs as constrained Horn clauses. Starting from operational semantics transition rules, we proceed by writing interpreters as constrained Horn clause programs directly encoding the rules. We then specialise an interpreter with respect to a given source program to achieve a compilation of the source language to Horn clauses (an instance of the first Futamura projection). The process is described in detail for an interpreter for a subset of C, directly encoding the rules of big-step operational semantics for C. A similar translation based on small…
We present a new approach to a technique known as compiling control, whose aim is to compile away special mechanisms for non-standard atom selection in logic programs. It has previously been conjectured that compiling control could be implemented as an instance of the first Futamura projection, in which an interpreter is specialized for an input program. However, the exact nature of such an interpreter and of the required technique for specialization were never specified. In this work, we propose a Prolog meta-interpreter which applies the desired non-standard selection rule and which is amena…
This paper surveys recent work on applying analysis and transformation techniques that originate in the field of constraint logic programming (CLP) to the problem of verifying software systems. We present specialisation-based techniques for translating verification problems for different programming languages, and in general software systems, into satisfiability problems for constrained Horn clauses (CHCs), a term that has become popular in the verification field to refer to CLP programs. Then, we describe static analysis techniques for CHCs that may be used for inferring relevant program prop…
