FOLASP: FO(.) as Input Language for Answer Ser Solvers
  Over the past decades, Answer Set Programming (ASP) has emerged as an
important paradigm for declarative problem solving. Technological progress in
this area has been stimulated by the use of common standards, such as the
ASP-Core-2 language. While ASP has its roots in non-monotonic reasoning,
efforts have also been made to reconcile ASP with classical first-order logic
(FO). This has resulted in the development of FO(.), an expressive extension of
FO, which allows ASP-like problem solving in a purely classical setting. This
language may be more accessible to domain experts already familiar with FO, and
may be easier to combine with other formalisms that are based on classical
logic. It is supported by the IDP inference system, which has successfully
competed in a number of ASP competitions. Here, however, technological progress
has been hampered by the limited number of systems that are available for
FO(.). In this paper, we aim to address this gap by means of a translation tool
that transforms an FO(.) specification into ASP-Core-2, thereby allowing
ASP-Core-2 solvers to be used as solvers for FO(.) as well. We present
experimental results to show that the resulting combination of our translation
with an off-the-shelf ASP solver is competitive with the IDP system as a way of
solving problems formulated in FO(.).
  Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
