from Part 2 - Language Restrictions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
One approach for dealing with intractability is to utilize representations that permit certain queries of interest to be computable in polytime. Such tractable representations will ultimately be exponential in size for certain problems and they may also not be suitable for direct specification by users. Hence, they are typically generated from other specifications through a process known as knowledge compilation. In this chapter, we review a subset of these tractable representations, known as decomposable negation normal forms (DNNFs), which have proved influential in a number of applications, including formal verification, model-based diagnosis and probabilistic reasoning.
Introduction
Many areas of computer science have shown a great interest in tractable and canonical representations of propositional knowledge bases (aka, Boolean functions). The ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD) is one such representation that received much attention and proved quite influential in a variety of areas [13]. Within AI, the study of tractable representations has also had a long tradition (e.g., [61, 30, 31, 49, 62, 14, 28, 19, 13, 52, 66, 50]). This area of research, which is also known as knowledge compilation, has become more systematic since [28], which showed that many known and useful representations are subsets of negation normal form (NNF) and correspond to imposing specific properties on NNF. The most fundamental of these properties turned out to be decomposability and determinism, giving rise to the corresponding language of DNNF and its subset, d-DNNF. This chapter is dedicated to DNNF and its subsets, which also include the influential language of OBDDs, and the more recently introduced sentential decision diagrams (SDDs).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.