Computing weighted solutions in ASP: representation-based method vs. search-based method

Abstract

For some problems with many solutions, like planning and phylogeny reconstruction, one way to compute more desirable solutions is to assign weights to solutions, and then pick the ones whose weights are over (resp. below) a threshold. This paper studies computing weighted solutions to such problems in Answer Set Programming. We investigate two sorts of methods for computing weighted solutions: one suggests modifying the representation of the problem and the other suggests modifying the search procedure of the answer set solver. We show the applicability and the effectiveness of these methods in reconstructing weighted phylogenies for Indo-European languages. We also compare these methods in terms of computational efficiency; the experimental results show that the search-based method is better.