A Generalisation of Epistemic Splitting Property

Answer-set programming (ASP) is a declarative logic programming paradigm that provides an efficient problem-solving approach in logic-based artificial intelligence (AI). While it has proven successful, ASP encounters specific situations where its language falls short of accurately representing and reasoning about incomplete information. Researchers now widely agree that ASP requires powerful introspective reasoning with the use of epistemic modal operators; yet, despite long-lasting debates on how to extend ASP with such operators, they cannot reach a consensus on satisfactory semantics. Cabalar et al. argue that such research should be grounded in formal robustness. Thus, inspired by ASP's foundational properties, they introduce a structural principle called epistemic splitting and designate it as one of the compulsory criteria for epistemic ASP. This paper generalises their approach to a more comprehensive, meticulous, and conservative extension of ASP-splitting, thereby enhancing its applicability and efficiency.