scholarly journals Argumentation and Defeasible Reasoning in the Law

J ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 897-914
Author(s):  
Marco Billi ◽  
Roberta Calegari ◽  
Giuseppe Contissa ◽  
Francesca Lagioia ◽  
Giuseppe Pisano ◽  
...  

Different formalisms for defeasible reasoning have been used to represent knowledge and reason in the legal field. In this work, we provide an overview of the following logic-based approaches to defeasible reasoning: defeasible logic, Answer Set Programming, ABA+, ASPIC+, and DeLP. We compare features of these approaches under three perspectives: the logical model (knowledge representation), the method (computational mechanisms), and the technology (available software resources). On top of that, two real examples in the legal domain are designed and implemented in ASPIC+ to showcase the benefit of an argumentation approach in real-world domains. The CrossJustice and Interlex projects are taken as a testbed, and experiments are conducted with the Arg2P technology.

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 866-883 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH REDL

AbstractThedlvhexsystem implements thehex-semantics, which integrates answer set programming (ASP) with arbitrary external sources. Since its first release ten years ago, significant advancements were achieved. Most importantly, the exploitation of properties of external sources led to efficiency improvements and flexibility enhancements of the language, and technical improvements on the system side increased user's convenience. In this paper, we present the current status of the system and point out the most important recent enhancements over early versions. While existing literature focuses on theoretical aspects and specific components, a bird's eye view of the overall system is missing. In order to promote the system for real-world applications, we further present applications which were already successfully realized on top ofdlvhex.


AI Magazine ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Brewka ◽  
Thomas Eiter ◽  
Miroslaw Truszczynski

This editorial introduces answer set programming, a vibrant research area in computational knowledge representation and declarative programming. We give a brief overview of the articles that form this special issue on answer set programming and of the main topics they discuss.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 609-624
Author(s):  
ANTONIUS WEINZIERL ◽  
RICHARD TAUPE ◽  
GERHARD FRIEDRICH

AbstractAnswer-Set Programming (ASP) is a powerful and expressive knowledge representation paradigm with a significant number of applications in logic-based AI. The traditional ground-and-solve approach, however, requires ASP programs to be grounded upfront and thus suffers from the so-called grounding bottleneck (i.e., ASP programs easily exhaust all available memory and thus become unsolvable). As a remedy, lazy-grounding ASP solvers have been developed, but many state-of-the-art techniques for grounded ASP solving have not been available to them yet. In this work we present, for the first time, adaptions to the lazy-grounding setting for many important techniques, like restarts, phase saving, domain-independent heuristics, and learned-clause deletion. Furthermore, we investigate their effects and in general observe a large improvement in solving capabilities and also uncover negative effects in certain cases, indicating the need for portfolio solving as known from other solvers.


Author(s):  
Jori Bomanson ◽  
Tomi Janhunen ◽  
Antonius Weinzierl

Answer-Set Programming (ASP) is an expressive rule-based knowledge-representation formalism. Lazy grounding is a solving technique that avoids the well-known grounding bottleneck of traditional ASP evaluation but is restricted to normal rules, severely limiting its expressive power. In this work, we introduce a framework to handle aggregates by normalizing them on demand during lazy grounding, hence relieving the restrictions of lazy grounding significantly. We term our approach as lazy normalization and demonstrate its feasibility for different types of aggregates. Asymptotic behavior is analyzed and correctness of the presented lazy normalizations is shown. Benchmark results indicate that lazy normalization can bring up-to exponential gains in space and time as well as enable ASP to be used in new application areas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN GEBSER ◽  
MARCO MARATEA ◽  
FRANCESCO RICCA

AbstractAnswer Set Programming (ASP) is a prominent knowledge representation language with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Biennial ASP competitions are organized in order to furnish challenging benchmark collections and assess the advancement of the state of the art in ASP solving. In this paper, we report on the design and results of the Seventh ASP Competition, jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the University of Genova (Italy), and the University of Potsdam (Germany), in affiliation with the 14th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2017).


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
REINHARD PICHLER ◽  
STEFAN RÜMMELE ◽  
STEFAN SZEIDER ◽  
STEFAN WOLTRAN

AbstractCardinality constraints or, more generally, weight constraints are well recognized as an important extension of answer-set programming. Clearly, all common algorithmic tasks related to programs with cardinality or weight constraints – like checking the consistency of a program – are intractable. Many intractable problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning have been shown to become linear time tractable if the treewidth of the programs or formulas under consideration is bounded by some constant. The goal of this paper is to apply the notion of treewidth to programs with cardinality or weight constraints and to identify tractable fragments. It will turn out that the straightforward application of treewidth to such class of programs does not suffice to obtain tractability. However, by imposing further restrictions, tractability can be achieved.


AI Magazine ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esra Erdem ◽  
Michael Gelfond ◽  
Nicola Leone

ASP has been applied fruitfully to a wide range of areas in AI and in other fields, both in academia and in industry, thanks to the expressive representation languages of ASP and the continuous improvement of ASP solvers. We present some of these ASP applications, in particular, in knowledge representation and reasoning, robotics, bioinformatics and computational biology as well as some industrial applications. We discuss the challenges addressed by ASP in these applications and emphasize the strengths of ASP as a useful AI paradigm.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 653-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
CARMINE DODARO ◽  
PHILIP GASTEIGER ◽  
NICOLA LEONE ◽  
BENJAMIN MUSITSCH ◽  
FRANCESCO RICCA ◽  
...  

AbstractAnswer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular logic programming paradigm that has been applied for solving a variety of complex problems. Among the most challenging real-world applications of ASP are two industrial problems defined by Siemens: the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and the Combined Configuration Problem (CCP). The hardest instances of PUP and CCP are out of reach for state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Experiments show that the performance of ASP solvers could be significantly improved by embedding domain-specific heuristics, but a proper effective integration of such criteria in off-the-shelf ASP implementations is not obvious. In this paper the combination of ASP and domain-specific heuristics is studied with the goal of effectively solving real-world problem instances of PUP and CCP. As a byproduct of this activity, the ASP solverwaspwas extended with an interface that eases embedding new external heuristics in the solver. The evaluation shows that our domain-heuristic-driven ASP solver finds solutions for all the real-world instances of PUP and CCP ever provided by Siemens.


Author(s):  
Bart Bogaerts ◽  
Antonius Weinzierl

Answer set programming (ASP) is an established knowledge representation formalism. Lazy grounding avoids the so-called grounding bottleneck of ASP by interleaving grounding and solving; this technique was recently extended to work with conflict-driven clause learning. Unfortunately, it often happens that such a lazy grounding ASP system, at the fixpoint of the evaluation, arrives at an assignment that contains literals that are true but unjustified. The system then is unable to determine the actual causes of the situation and falls back to chronological backtracking, potentially wasting an exponential amount of time. In this paper, we show how top-down query mechanisms can be used to analyze the situation, learn a new clause or nogood, and backjump further in the search tree. Contributions include a rephrasing of lazy grounding in terms of justifications and algorithms to construct relevant justifications without grounding. Initial experiments indicate that the newly developed techniques indeed allow for an exponential speed-up.


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