On the role of logical separability in knowledge compilation

Abstract

Knowledge compilation is an alternative solution to address demanding reasoning tasks with high complexity via converting knowledge bases into a suitable target language. The notion of logical separability, proposed by Levesque, offers a general explanation for the tractability of clausal entailment for two remarkable languages: decomposable negation normal form and prime implicates. It is interesting to explore what role logical separability plays in problem tractability. In this paper, we apply the notion of logical separability to a number of reasoning problems within the context of propositional logic: satisfiability checking (CO), clausal entailment checking (CE), model counting (CT), model enumeration (ME) and forgetting (FO), as well as their dual tasks, contributing to several recursive procedures. We provide the corresponding logical separability based properties: CO-logical separability, CE-logical separability, CT-logical separability, ME-logical separability and their duals. Based on these properties, we then identify four novel normal forms: CO-LSNNF, CE-LSNNF, CT-LSNNF and ME-LSNNF, as well as their dual languages. We show that each of them is the necessary and sufficient condition under which the corresponding procedure is correct. We finally integrate the above normal forms into the knowledge compilation map.