A comparative study of logic programs with preference

Abstract

We are interested in semantical underpinnings for existing approaches to preference handling in extended logic programming (within the framework of answer set programming). As a starting point, we explore three different approaches that have been recently proposed in the literature. Because these approaches use rather different formal means, we furnish a series of uniform characterizations that allow us to gain insights into the relationships among these approaches. To be more precise, we provide different characterizations in terms of (i) fixpoints, (ii) order preservation, and (iii) translations into standard logic programs. While the two former provide semantics for logic programming with preference information, the latter furnishes implementation techniques for these approaches.