On Exact Selection of Minimally Unsatisfiable Subformulae

  • Authors:
  • Renato Bruni

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Buonarroti 12, 00185 Roma, Italy E-mail: bruni@dis.uniroma1.it

  • Venue:
  • Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

A minimally unsatisfiable subformula (MUS) is a subset of clauses of a given CNF formula which is unsatisfiable but becomes satisfiable as soon as any of its clauses is removed. The selection of a MUS is of great relevance in many practical applications. This expecially holds when the propositional formula encoding the application is required to have a well-defined satisfiability property (either to be satisfiable or to be unsatisfiable). While selection of a MUS is a hard problem in general, we show classes of formulae where this problem can be solved efficiently. This is done by using a variant of Farkas' lemma and solving a linear programming problem. Successful results on real-world contradiction detection problems are presented.