Redundant argument filtering of logic programs

This paper is concerned with the problem of removing redundant arguments from logic programs. Such arguments can be removed without affecting correctness, in a certain sense. Most program specialisation techniques, even though they filter arguments and remove clauses, fail to remove a substantial number of redundant arguments, yielding in some cases rather inefficient residual programs. We formalise the notion of a redundant argument and show that one cannot effectively remove all redundant arguments. We then give a safe, effective approximation of the notion of a redundant argument and describe several simple and efficient algorithms based on the approximative notion. We conduct extensive experiments with our algorithms on mechanically generated programs illustrating the practical benefits of our approach.