A distribution semantics for probabilistic term rewriting

Probabilistic programming is becoming increasingly popular thanks to its ability to specify problems with a certain degree of uncertainty. In this work, we focus on term rewriting, a well-known computational formalism. In particular, we consider systems that combine traditional rewriting rules with...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of logical and algebraic methods in programming Vol. 146; p. 101070
Main Author Vidal, Germán
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.07.2025
Subjects
Modeling
Probability
Semantics
Term rewriting
Term rewriting
Probability
Semantics
Modeling
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Summary:Probabilistic programming is becoming increasingly popular thanks to its ability to specify problems with a certain degree of uncertainty. In this work, we focus on term rewriting, a well-known computational formalism. In particular, we consider systems that combine traditional rewriting rules with probabilities. Then, we define a novel “distribution semantics” for such systems that can be used to model the probability of reducing a term to some value. We also show how to compute a set of “explanations” for a given reduction, which can be used to compute its probability in a more efficient way. Finally, we illustrate our approach with several examples and outline a couple of extensions that may prove useful to improve the expressive power of probabilistic rewrite systems.
ISSN:2352-2208
DOI:10.1016/j.jlamp.2025.101070