A classification of abduction: abduction for logic programming

Abduction is a methodology of scienti c researches. Peirce showed three types of abduction, and expressed them by one syllogism. Recently various researches on abduction or abductive logic have been developed in the elds of automated reasoning and machine learning. In order to systematically understand such researches and to clearly discuss abduction, this paper classi es abduction into ve types. This new classi cation is based on an interpretation of the syllogism in abduction and the de nitions of hypotheses. We examine various researches on abduction so far developed and show that many researches on abduction can be placed in our classi cation. Furthermore, we discuss the most essential type of abduction in our classi cation for logic programming and default logic, and describe Prolog programs for the abduction.