On the correctness of unfold/fold transformation of normal and extended logic programs

Abstract

We show that the framework for unfold/fold transformation of logic programs, first proposed by Tamaki and Sato and later extended by various researchers, preserves various nonmonotonic semantics of normal logic programs, especially preferred extension, partial stable models, regular model, and stable theory semantics. The primary aim of this research is to adopt a uniform approach for every semantics of normal programs, and that is elegantly achieved through the notion of semantic kernel. Later, we show that this framework can also be applied to extended logic programs, preserving the answer set semantics.