A Neural Network Approach for First-Order Abductive Inference

This paper presents a neural network approach for first-order abductive inference by generalising an existing method from propositional logic to the first-order case. We show how the original propositional method can be extended to enable the grounding of a first-order abductive problem; and we also show how it can be modified to allow the prioritised computation of minimal solutions. We illustrate the approach on a well-known abductive problem and explain how it can be used to perform first-order conditional query answering.