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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 39th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2026) co-located with the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026)
EditorsAlisa Kovtunova, Barış Sertkaya
Number of pages24
Publication statusPublished - 2026
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesCEUR workshop proceedings
Volume4230
ISSN1613-0073

Workshop

Title39th International Workshop on Description Logics
Abbreviated titleDL 2026
Conference number39
Descriptionco-located with several events as part of FLoC 2026, including KR 2026 and NMR 2026
Duration17 - 19 July 2026
Website
LocationInstituto Universitario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL)
CityLisbon
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-9936-0943/work/228956497

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • formal proofs, user studies, visualisation