Interactive Debugging of ASP Programs
This addresses the debugging bottleneck for ASP programmers, offering an incremental improvement over existing approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of manually selecting the correct fault explanation from many possibilities in answer set programming (ASP) debugging by introducing an interactive query-based method that uses observations to find a preferred explanation, reducing the number of queries needed.
Broad application of answer set programming (ASP) for declarative problem solving requires the development of tools supporting the coding process. Program debugging is one of the crucial activities within this process. Recently suggested ASP debugging approaches allow efficient computation of possible explanations of a fault. However, even for a small program a debugger might return a large number of possible explanations and selection of the correct one must be done manually. In this paper we present an interactive query-based ASP debugging method which extends previous approaches and finds a preferred explanation by means of observations. The system queries a programmer whether a set of ground atoms must be true in all (cautiously) or some (bravely) answer sets of the program. Since some queries can be more informative than the others, we discuss query selection strategies which, given user's preferences for an explanation, can find the best query. That is, the query an answer of which reduces the overall number of queries required for the identification of a preferred explanation.