Stable Models and Circumscription

To appear in Artificial Intelligence

Paolo Ferraris, Joohyung Lee, and Vladimir Lifschitz

The concept of a stable model provided a declarative semantics for Prolog programs with negation as failure and became a starting point for the development of answer set programming. In this paper we propose a new definition of that concept, which covers many constructs used in answer set programming and, unlike the original definition, refers neither to grounding nor to fixpoints. It is based on a syntactic transformation similar to parallel circumscription.

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