An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

Eiter, Thomas; Geibinger, Tobias; Saribatur, Zeynep G.

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2026/870

An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

Thomas Eiter, Tobias Geibinger, Zeynep G. Saribatur

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Survey Track. Pages 7835-7844.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/870

Keywords

AI Ethics, Trust, Fairnes: Explainability and interpretability
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Non-monotonic reasoning
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Logic programming

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative reasoning and problem solving approach in symbolic AI.

Its rule-based formalism makes it inherently attractive for explainable and interpretive reasoning, which is gaining importance with the surge of Explainable AI (XAI). A number of explanation approaches and tools for ASP have been developed, which often tackle specific explanatory settings and may not cover all scenarios that ASP users encounter.

In this survey, we provide, guided by an XAI perspective, an overview of types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, and describe their coverage by current theory and tools.

Furthermore, we pinpoint gaps in existing ASP explanations approaches and identify research directions for future work.

Thomas Eiter, Tobias Geibinger, and Zeynep G. Saribatur. 2026. An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26. IJCAI, 7835–7844. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/870

@inproceedings{ijcai2026p870,
  title     = {An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives},
  author    = {Eiter, Thomas and Geibinger, Tobias and Saribatur, Zeynep G.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-26}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {Diego Calvanese},
  pages     = {7835--7844},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Survey Track},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2026/870},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/870},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives
AU  - Eiter, Thomas
AU  - Geibinger, Tobias
AU  - Saribatur, Zeynep G.
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2026
SP  - 7835
EP  - 7844
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2026/870
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/870
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