Sound and complete partial deduction with unfolding based on well-founded measures

Abstract

We present a procedure for partial deduction of logic programs, based on an automatic unfolding algorithm which guarantees the construction of sensibly and strongly expanded, finite SLD-trees. We prove that the partial deduction procedure terminates for all definite logic programs and queries. We show that the resulting program satisfies important soundness and completeness criteria with respect to the original program, while retaining the essentially desired amount of specialisation.