A Unified View on Forgetting and Strong Equivalence Notions in Answer Set Programming

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a prominent rule-based language for knowledge representation and reasoning with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. The aim to capture the essence of removing (ir)relevant details in ASP programs led to the investigation of different notions, from strong persistence (SP) forgetting, to faithful abstractions, and, recently, strong simplifications, where the latter two can be seen as relaxed and strengthened notions of forgetting, respectively. Although it was observed that these notions are related, especially given that they have characterizations through the semantics for strong equivalence, it remained unclear whether they can be brought together. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing a novel relativized equivalence notion, which is a relaxation of the recent simplification notion, that is able to capture all related notions from the literature. We provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for relativized simplifiability, which shows that the challenging part is for when the context programs do not contain all the atoms to remove. We then introduce an operator that combines projection and a relaxation of SP-forgetting to obtain the relativized simplifications. We furthermore provide complexity results that complete the overall picture.