Rushing and Strolling among Answer Sets -- Navigation Made Easy
This addresses the challenge for AI practitioners and users in ASP applications, such as medical reasoning, who need to identify specific solutions or understand solution differences, but it is incremental as it builds on existing faceted browsing concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of navigating the solution space in answer set programming (ASP) by proposing a formal framework for interactive navigation, analogous to faceted browsing, which allows users to explore subsets of answer sets by zooming in or out at a configurable pace.
Answer set programming (ASP) is a popular declarative programming paradigm with a wide range of applications in artificial intelligence. Oftentimes, when modeling an AI problem with ASP, and in particular when we are interested beyond simple search for optimal solutions, an actual solution, differences between solutions, or number of solutions of the ASP program matter. For example, when a user aims to identify a specific answer set according to her needs, or requires the total number of diverging solutions to comprehend probabilistic applications such as reasoning in medical domains. Then, there are only certain problem specific and handcrafted encoding techniques available to navigate the solution space of ASP programs, which is oftentimes not enough. In this paper, we propose a formal and general framework for interactive navigation towards desired subsets of answer sets analogous to faceted browsing. Our approach enables the user to explore the solution space by consciously zooming in or out of sub-spaces of solutions at a certain configurable pace. We illustrate that weighted faceted navigation is computationally hard. Finally, we provide an implementation of our approach that demonstrates the feasibility of our framework for incomprehensible solution spaces.