A fixpoint characterization of abductive logic programs

AbstractA new fixpoint semantics for abductive logic programs is provided, in which the belief models of an abductive program are characterized as the fixpoint of a disjunctive program obtained by a suitable program transformation. In the transformation, both negative hypotheses through negation as failure and positive hypotheses from the abducibles are dealt with uniformly. The result is further generalized to a fixpoint semantics for abductive extended disjunctive programs. These characterizations allow us to have a parallel bottom-up model generation procedure for computing abductive explanations from any (range-restricted and function-free) normal, extended, and disjunctive programs with integrity constraints