Tabled logic programming
{{Short description|Technique in natural language processing}}
{{redirect|Tabling|the parliamentary procedure|Table (parliamentary procedure)}}
Tabling is a technique first developed for natural language processing, where it was called Earley parsing. It consists of storing in a table (a.k.a. chart in the context of parsing) partial successful analyses that might come in handy for future reuse.
Tabling consists of maintaining a table of goals that are called during execution, along with their answers, and then using the answers directly when the same goal is subsequently called. Tabling gives a guarantee of total correctness for any (pure) Prolog program without function symbols.{{Cite journal |last1=Körner |first1=Philipp |last2=Leuschel |first2=Michael |last3=Barbosa |first3=Joao |last4=Costa |first4=Vitor Santos |last5=Dahl |first5=Veronica |last6=Hermengildo |first6=Manuel V. |last7=Morales |first7=Jose F. |last8=Wielemaker |first8=Jan |last9=Diaz |first9=Daniel |last10=Abreu |first10=Salvador |last11=Ciatto |first11=Giovanni |date=2022-05-17 |title=Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond |journal=Theory and Practice of Logic Programming |volume=22 |issue=6 |pages=776–858 |doi=10.1017/s1471068422000102 |issn=1471-0684|doi-access=free |hdl=10174/33387 |hdl-access=free }}
Tabling can be extended in various directions. It can support recursive predicates through SLG resolution or linear tabling. In a multi-threaded Prolog system tabling results could be kept private to a thread or shared among all threads. And in incremental tabling, tabling might react to changes.{{Cite journal |last1=Swift |first1=T. |journal=Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence |volume=25 |issue=3/4 |pages=201–240|title=Tabling for non-monotonic programming |year=1999 |doi=10.1023/A:1018990308362 |s2cid=16695800}}{{cite journal|last1=Zhou|first1=Neng-Fa|last2=Sato|first2=Taisuke|title=Efficient Fixpoint Computation in Linear Tabling|journal=Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming|date=2003|pages=275–283|url=http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~zhou/papers/ppdp03.pdf}}
History
The adaptation of tabling into a logic programming proof procedure, under the name of Earley deduction, dates from an unpublished note from 1975 by David H.D. Warren.{{Cite book |last1=Pereira |first1=Fernando C. N. |title=Prolog and Natural Language Analysis |last2=Shieber |first2=Stuart M. |publisher=Center for the Study of Language and Information |year=1987 |location=Stanford |pages=185–210}} An interpretation method based on tabling was later developed by Tamaki and Sato, modelled as a refinement of SLD-resolution.{{Citation |last1=Tamaki |first1=Hisao |title=OLD resolution with tabulation |date=1986 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16492-8_66 |work=Lecture Notes in Computer Science |pages=84–98 |access-date=2023-10-27 |place=Berlin, Heidelberg |publisher=Springer Berlin Heidelberg |isbn=978-3-540-16492-0 |last2=Sato |first2=Taisuke|doi=10.1007/3-540-16492-8_66 |url-access=subscription }}
David S. Warren and his students adopted this technique with the motivation of changing Prolog’s semantics from the completion semantics to the minimal model semantics.
Tabled Prolog was first introduced in XSB.{{Cite journal |last1=Sagonas |first1=Konstantinos |last2=Swift |first2=Terrance |last3=Warren |first3=David S. |date=1994-05-24 |title=XSB as an efficient deductive database engine |journal=ACM SIGMOD Record |volume=23 |issue=2 |pages=442–453 |doi=10.1145/191843.191927 |issn=0163-5808|doi-access=free }} This resulted in a complete implementation of the well-founded semantics, a three-valued semantics that represents values for true, false and unknown.{{Citation |last1=Rao |first1=Prasad |title=XSB: A system for efficiently computing well-founded semantics |date=1997 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63255-7_33 |work=Logic Programming And Nonmonotonic Reasoning |pages=430–440 |access-date=2023-10-27 |place=Berlin, Heidelberg |publisher=Springer Berlin Heidelberg |isbn=978-3-540-63255-9 |last2=Sagonas |first2=Konstantinos |last3=Swift |first3=Terrance |last4=Warren |first4=David S. |last5=Freire |first5=Juliana|doi=10.1007/3-540-63255-7_33 |url-access=subscription }}
References
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- {{CC-notice|cc=by4|from this source=Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theory-and-practice-of-logic-programming/article/fifty-years-of-prolog-and-beyond/3A5329B6E3639879301A6D44346FD1DD|date=17 May 2022|author(s)=PHILIPP KÖRNER, MICHAEL LEUSCHEL, JOÃO BARBOSA, VÍTOR SANTOS COSTA, VERÓNICA DAHL, MANUEL V. HERMENEGILDO, JOSE F. MORALES, JAN WIELEMAKER, DANIEL DIAZ, SALVADOR ABREU and GIOVANNI CIATTO}}
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