Reduction Rules for Resolution-Based Systems

Inference rules for resolution based systems can be classified into deduction rules, which add new objects, and reduction rules, which remove objects. Traditional reduction rules like subsumption do not actively contribute to a solution, but they help to avoid redundancies in the search space. We present a number of advanced reduction rules, which can cope with high degrees of redundancy and play a distinctly active part because they find trivial solutions on their own and thus relieve the control component for the deduction rules from low level tasks. We describe how these reduction rules can be implemented with reasonable efficiency in a clause graph resolution system, but they are not restricted to this particular representation.