Intensional query answering by partial evaluation

摘要

Intensional query answering aims at providing a response to a query addressed to a knowledge base by making use of the intensional knowledge as opposed to extensional. Such a response is an abstract description of the conventional answer that can be of interest in many situations, for example it may increase the cooperativeness of the system, or it may replace the conventional answer in case access to the extensional part of the knowledge base is costly as for Mobile Systems. In this paper we present a general framework to generate intensional answers in knowledge bases adhering to the logic programming paradigm. Such a framework is based on a program transformation technique, namely Partial Evaluation, and allows for generating complete and procedurally complete (wrt SLDNF-resolution) sets of intensional answers, treating both recursion and negation conveniently.