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Justifying answer sets using argumentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2015

CLAUDIA SCHULZ  and
FRANCESCA TONI
CLAUDIA SCHULZ
Affiliation:
Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK (e-mail: claudia.schulz@imperial.ac.uk, f.toni@imperial.ac.uk)
FRANCESCA TONI
Affiliation:
Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK (e-mail: claudia.schulz@imperial.ac.uk, f.toni@imperial.ac.uk)
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Abstract

An answer set is a plain set of literals which has no further structure that would explain why certain literals are part of it and why others are not. We show how argumentation theory can help to explain why a literal is or is not contained in a given answer set by defining two justification methods, both of which make use of the correspondence between answer sets of a logic program and stable extensions of the assumption-based argumentation (ABA) framework constructed from the same logic program. Attack Trees justify a literal in argumentation-theoretic terms, i.e. using arguments and attacks between them, whereas ABA-Based Answer Set Justifications express the same justification structure in logic programming terms, that is using literals and their relationships. Interestingly, an ABA-Based Answer Set Justification corresponds to an admissible fragment of the answer set in question, and an Attack Tree corresponds to an admissible fragment of the stable extension corresponding to this answer set.

Keywords

answer set programmingassumption-based argumentationstable extensionexplanation
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 59 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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