Similarity-based reasoning in qualified logic programming

Similarity-based Logic Programming (briefly, SLP) has been proposed to enhance the LP paradigm with a kind of approximate reasoning which supports flexible information retrieval applications. This approach uses a fuzzy similarity relation ℝ between symbols in the program's signature, while keeping the syntax for program clauses as in classical LP. Another recent proposal is the QLP(D) scheme for Qualified Logic Programming, an extension of the LP paradigm which supports approximate reasoning and more. This approach uses annotated program clauses and a parametrically given domain D whose elements qualify logical assertions by measuring their closeness to various users' expectations. In this paper we propose a more expressive scheme SQLP(ℝ, D) which subsumes both SLP and QLP(D) as particular cases. We also show that SQLP(ℝ, D) programs can be transformed into semantically equivalent QLP(D) programs. As a consequence, existing QLP(D) implementations can be used to give efficient support for similarity-based reasoning