Abstract
Partial deduction is a specialization principle related to the law of syllogism. It has several computational applications in logic programming but it has been recently also used in deductive databases, machine learning, software synthesis and other areas of computing. This article is a systematic introduction to partial deduction, its applications and open problems. Starting from an informal and intuitive presentation, the fundamental notions such as correctness and completeness are discussed. A selection of applications is presented to illustrate partial deduction in different contexts.
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