*Result*: F.: Applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving

*Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for Answer Set Programming (ASP), there are two usual ways to reach this goal: (i) extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or (ii) designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the “best ” available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, given the features of the instances in a training set and the solvers performance on these instances, we apply a classification method to inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a test set. We report the results of an experiment considering solvers and training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the “System Track ” of the 3rd ASP competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve a higher number of instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP competition.*