---
title: "An Approach to Abductive Reasoning in Equational Logic"
authors:
  - "Mnacho Echenim"
  - "Nicolas Peltier"
  - "Sophie Tourret"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/86"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/0086.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2013
pages: "531-536"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# An Approach to Abductive Reasoning in Equational Logic

Mnacho Echenim, Nicolas Peltier, Sophie Tourret

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 531-536.

## Abstract

Abduction has been extensively studied in propositional logic because of its many applications in artificial intelligence. However, its intrinsic complexity has been a limitation to the implementation of abductive reasoning tools in more expressive logics. We have devised such a tool in ground flat equational logic, in which literals are equations or disequations between constants. Our tool is based on the computation of prime implicates. It uses a relaxed paramodulation calculus, designed to generate all prime implicates of a formula, together with a carefully defined data structure storing the implicates and able to efficiently detect, and remove, redundancies. In addition to a detailed description of this method, we present an analysis of some experimental results.