Mode-Directed Tabling and Applications in the YapTab System
João Santos and Ricardo Rocha
June 2012
Abstract
Tabling is an implementation technique that solves some limitations of
Prolog's operational semantics in dealing with recursion and redundant
sub-computations. Tabling works by memorizing generated answers and
then by reusing them on similar calls that appear during the
resolution process. In a traditional tabling system, all the arguments
of a tabled subgoal call are considered when storing answers into the
table space. Traditional tabling systems are thus very good for
problems that require finding all answers. Mode-directed tabling is an
extension to the tabling technique that supports the definition of
selective criteria for specifying how answers are inserted into the
table space. Implementations of mode-directed tabling are already
available in systems like ALS-Prolog, B-Prolog and XSB. In this paper,
we propose a more general approach to the declaration and use of
mode-directed tabling, implemented on top of the YapTab tabling
system, and we show applications of our approach to problems involving
Justification, Preferences and Answer Subsumption.
Bibtex
@InProceedings{santos-slate12,
author = {J. Santos and R. Rocha},
title = {{Mode-Directed Tabling and Applications in the YapTab System}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2012)},
pages = {25--40},
editor = {A. Simões and R. Queirós and D. Cruz},
month = {June},
year = {2012},
address = {Braga, Portugal},
}
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