ON THE DUALITY OF ABDUCTION AND MODEL GENERATION IN A FRAMEWORK FOR MODEL GENERATION WITH EQUALITY

We present a duality relationship between abduction for definite abduc tive programs and model generation on the only-if part of these progra ms. As was pointed out by Console et al. (1991), abductive solutions f or an abductive program correspond to models of the only-if part. We e xtend this observation by showing that the procedural semantics of abd uction itself can be interpreted dually as a form of model generation on the only-if part. This model generation extends Satchmo with an eff icient treatment of equality atoms occurring in the head of rules. It is illustrated how this duality allows to improve current procedures f or both abduction and model generation by transferring technical resul ts known for one of these computational paradigms to the other.