Courteous Logic Programs: Prioritized Conflict Handling For Rules

by Benjamin N. Grosof

Abstract: 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.

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