Nonground Abductive Logic Programming with Probabilistic Integrity Constraints

Abstract: Uncertain information is being taken into account in an increasing number of application fields. In the meantime, abduction has been proved a powerful tool for handling hypothetical reasoning and incomplete knowledge. Probabilistic logical models are a suitable framework to handle uncertain information, and in the last decade many probabilistic logical languages have been proposed, as well as inference and learning systems for them. In the realm of Abductive Logic Programming (ALP), a variety of proof procedures have been defined as well. In this paper, we consider a richer logic language, coping with probabilistic abduction with variables. In particular, we consider an ALP program enriched with integrity constraints `a la IFF, possibly annotated with a probability value. We first present the overall abductive language, and its semantics according to the Distribution Semantics. We then introduce a proof procedure, obtained by extending one previously presented, and prove its soundness and completeness.