A Classification of Abduction :Abduction for Logic Programming

to appear Machine Intelligence,14Abduction is a methodology of scientific researches. Peirce showed three types of abduction, and expressed them by one syllogism. Recently various researches on abduction or abductive logic have been developed in the fields of automated reasoning and machine learning. In order to systematically understand such researches and to clearly discuss abduction, this paper classifies abduction into five types. This new classification is based on an interpretation of the syllogism in abduction and the definitions of hypotheses. We examine various researches on abduction so far developed and show that many researches on abduction can be placed in our classification. Furthermore, we discuss the most essential type of abduction in our classification for logic programming and default logic, and describe Prolog programs for the abduction