Simon Marynissen

Simon Marynissen, Jesse Heyninck, Bart Bogaerts et al.

Justification theory is a general framework for the definition of semantics of rule-based languages that has a high explanatory potential. Nested justification systems, first introduced by Denecker et al. (2015), allow for the composition of justification systems. This notion of nesting thus enables the modular definition of semantics of rule-based languages, and increases the representational capacities of justification theory. As we show in this paper, the original semantics for nested justification systems lead to the loss of information relevant for explanations. In view of this problem, we provide an alternative characterization of semantics of nested justification systems and show that this characterization is equivalent to the original semantics. Furthermore, we show how nested justification systems allow representing fixpoint definitions (Hou and Denecker 2009).

Simon Marynissen, Bart Bogaerts

Justification theory is an abstract unifying formalism that captures semantics of various non-monotonic logics. One intriguing problem that has received significant attention is the consistency problem: under which conditions are justifications for a fact and justifications for its negation suitably related. Two variants of justification theory exist: one in which justifications are trees and one in which they are graphs. In this work we resolve the consistency problem once and for all for the tree-like setting by showing that all reasonable tree-like justification systems are consistent.

Simon Marynissen

Justification theory is a unifying framework for semantics of non-monotonic logics. It is built on the notion of a justification, which intuitively is a graph that explains the truth value of certain facts in a structure. Knowledge representation languages covered by justification theory include logic programs, argumentation frameworks, inductive definitions, and nested inductive and coinductive definitions. In addition, justifications are also used for implementation purposes. They are used to compute unfounded sets in modern ASP solvers, can be used to check for relevance of atoms in complete search algorithms, and recent lazy grounding algorithms are built on top of them. In this extended abstract, we lay out possible extensions to justification theory.