Recursive Rules with Aggregation: A Simple Unified Semantics

Abstract

Complex reasoning problems are most clearly and easily specified using logical rules, but require recursive rules with aggregation such as counts and sums for practical applications. Unfortunately, the meaning of such rules has been a significant challenge, leading to many disagreeing semantics.This paper describes a unified semantics for recursive rules with aggregation, extending the unified founded semantics and constraint semantics for recursive rules with negation. The key idea is to support simple expression of the different assumptions underlying different semantics, and orthogonally interpret aggregation operations using their simple usual meaning. We present formal definition of the semantics, prove important properties of the semantics, and compare with prior semantics. In particular, we present an efficient inference over aggregation that gives precise answers to all examples we have studied from the literature. We also applied our semantics to a wide range of challenging examples, and performed experiments on the most challenging ones, all confirming our analyzed results.