Complexity issues related to propagation completeness

摘要

Knowledge compilation is a process of adding more information to a knowledge base in order to make it easier to deduce facts from the compiled base than from the original one. One type of knowledge compilation occurs when the knowledge in question is represented by a Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF). The goal of knowledge compilation in this case is to add clauses to the input CNF until a logically equivalent propagation complete CNF is obtained. A CNF is called propagation complete if after any partial substitution of truth values all logically entailed literals can be inferred from the resulting CNF formula by unit propagation. The key to this type of knowledge compilation is the ability to generate so-called empowering clauses. A clause is empowering for a CNF if it is an implicate and for some partial substitution of truth values it enlarges the set of entailed literals inferable by unit propagation.