Benjamin Kiesl, Martin Suda, H. Tompits, Martina Seidl, Armin Biere,
"Blocked Clauses in First-Order Logic"
, in Thomas Eiter and David Sands: LPAR-21, 21st International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, Maun, Botswana, May 7-12, 2017, Serie EPiC Series in Computing, Vol. 46, EasyChair, Seite(n) 31-48, 2017
Original Titel:
Blocked Clauses in First-Order Logic
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
LPAR-21, 21st International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, Maun, Botswana, May 7-12, 2017
Original Kurzfassung:
Blocked clauses provide the basis for powerful reasoning techniques used in SAT, QBF, and DQBF solving. Their definition, which relies on a simple syntactic criterion, guarantees that they are both redundant and easy to find. In this paper, we lift the notion of blocked clauses to first-order logic. We introduce two types of blocked clauses, one for first-order logic with equality and the other for first-order logic without equality, and prove their redundancy. In addition, we give a polynomial algorithm for checking whether a clause is blocked. Based on our new notions of blocking, we implemented a novel first-order preprocessing tool. Our experiments showed that many first-order problems in the TPTP library contain a large number of blocked clauses whose elimination can improve the performance of modern theorem provers, especially on satisfiable problem instances.