Polynomial interpretations as a basis for termination analysis of logic programs

  • Authors:
  • Manh Thang Nguyen;Danny De Schreye

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, K.U. Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium;Department of Computer Science, K.U. Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • ICLP'05 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new technique for termination analysis of definite logic programs based on polynomial interpretations. The principle of this technique is to map each function and predicate symbol to a polynomial over some domain of natural numbers, like it has been done in proving termination of term rewriting systems. Such polynomial interpretations can be seen as a direct generalisation of the traditional techniques in termination analysis of LPs, where (semi-) linear norms and level mappings are used. Our extension generalises these to arbitrary polynomials. We extend a number of standard concepts and results on termination analysis to the context of polynomial interpretations. We propose a constraint based approach for automatically generating polynomial interpretations that satisfy termination conditions.