Quantitative Constraint Logic Programming for Weighted Grammar Applications

Uncertainty in logic programming has been widely investigated in the last decades, leading to multiple extensions of the classical LP paradigm. However, few of these are designed as extensions of the well-established and powerful CLP scheme for Constraint Logic Programming. In a previous work we have proposed the SQCLP (proximity-based qualified constraint logic programming) scheme as a quite expressive extension of CLP with support for qualification values and proximity rela...

The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The advantages of the formlism are shown with respect to a grammar for a fragment of German that deals with (i) quantifier scope ambiguities triggered by scrambling and/or movement and (ii) ambiguities that arise from the collective/distributive distinction of plural NPs. The syntax-semantics interface directly implements syntactic conditions on quantifier scoping and distributivity. The construction of semant...

In this paper, we present two alternative approaches to defining answer sets for logic programs with arbitrary types of abstract constraint atoms (c-atoms). These approaches generalize the fixpoint-based and the level mapping based answer set semantics of normal logic programs to the case of logic programs with arbitrary types of c-atoms. The results are four different answer set definitions which are equivalent when applied to normal logic programs. The standard fixpoint-bas...

By fundamental results of Sch\"utzenberger, McNaughton and Papert from the 1970s, the classes of first-order definable and aperiodic languages coincide. Here, we extend this equivalence to a quantitative setting. For this, weighted automata form a general and widely studied model. We define a suitable notion of a weighted first-order logic. Then we show that this weighted first-order logic and aperiodic polynomially ambiguous weighted automata have the same expressive power. ...

Although unification can be used to implement a weak form of $\beta$-reduction, several linguistic phenomena are better handled by using some form of $\lambda$-calculus. In this paper we present a higher order feature description calculus based on a typed $\lambda$-calculus. We show how the techniques used in \CLG for resolving complex feature constraints can be efficiently extended. \CCLG is a simple formalism, based on categorial grammars, designed to test the practical fea...

Probabilistic logic programming is increasingly important in artificial intelligence and related fields as a formalism to reason about uncertainty. It generalises logic programming with the possibility of annotating clauses with probabilities. This paper proposes a coalgebraic semantics on probabilistic logic programming. Programs are modelled as coalgebras for a certain functor F, and two semantics are given in terms of cofree coalgebras. First, the F-coalgebra yields a sema...

Combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) is a grammar formalism used for natural language parsing. CCG assigns structured lexical categories to words and uses a small set of combinatory rules to combine these categories to parse a sentence. In this work we propose and implement a new approach to CCG parsing that relies on a prominent knowledge representation formalism, answer set programming (ASP) - a declarative programming paradigm. We formulate the task of CCG parsing as a pla...

The left-corner transformation (Rosenkrantz and Lewis, 1970) is used to remove left recursion from context-free grammars, which is an important step towards making the grammar parsable top-down with simple techniques. This paper generalizes prior left-corner transformations to support semiring-weighted production rules and to provide finer-grained control over which left corners may be moved. Our generalized left-corner transformation (GLCT) arose from unifying the left-corne...

Since the 1970s with the work of McNaughton, Papert and Sch\"utzenberger, a regular language is known to be definable in the first-order logic if and only if its syntactic monoid is aperiodic. This algebraic characterisation of a fundamental logical fragment has been extended in the quantitative case by Droste and Gastin, dealing with polynomially ambiguous weighted automata and a restricted fragment of weighted first-order logic. In the quantitative setting, the full weighte...

Search-optimization problems are plentiful in scientific and engineering domains. Artificial intelligence has long contributed to the development of search algorithms and declarative programming languages geared toward solving and modeling search-optimization problems. Automated reasoning and knowledge representation are the subfields of AI that are particularly vested in these developments. Many popular automated reasoning paradigms provide users with languages supporting op...