In the Heart of the Beholder: User-Tailored Explanations for Description Logics
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Many techniques have been developed to explain logical reasoning, such as proofs or abduction. However, such methods are useful mainly for experts in logic, e.g., for debugging ontologies. For actually explaining logical consequences and missing consequences to end users of logic-based systems, e.g., in the Semantic Web, it is necessary to study how to adapt and present such explanations in an understandable way. We report on a series of user studies investigating both entailment explanations via proofs and missing entailment explanations via abduction and counterexamples in the context of Description Logic (DL) ontologies. For the former, we assess the influence of prior knowledge on the necessary explanation granularity; for the latter, we compare the efficacy of abductive versus counterexample-based approaches. While we did not find objectively quantifiable results, we analyse and discuss the results of detailed qualitative user interviews, and extract recommendations for executing user studies on logical reasoning systems.
Details
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 39th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2026) co-located with the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026) |
| Editors | Alisa Kovtunova, Barış Sertkaya |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Publication status | Published - 2026 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Publication series
| Series | CEUR workshop proceedings |
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| Volume | 4230 |
| ISSN | 1613-0073 |
Workshop
| Title | 39th International Workshop on Description Logics |
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| Abbreviated title | DL 2026 |
| Conference number | 39 |
| Description | co-located with several events as part of FLoC 2026, including KR 2026 and NMR 2026 |
| Duration | 17 - 19 July 2026 |
| Website | |
| Location | Instituto Universitario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) |
| City | Lisbon |
| Country | Portugal |
External IDs
| ORCID | /0000-0001-9936-0943/work/228956497 |
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Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- formal proofs, user studies, visualisation