A first approach to abductive defeasible logic programming: formalization and properties

Abstract

This article presents the confluence of two general ideas: Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP, an argumentation based formalism for representing knowledge and reasoning) and Abduction in logic. In first place, we introduce a framework that formally states the problem of doing abduction (obtaining abductive explanations) in the particular case that the abductive theory is a DeLP Program. In the reminder of this work we face that problem, providing a formal characterization of the notion of abductive explanation, in such a way that we could then easily calculate the explanations from this formal characterization. An important advantage of this approach is that by proving the correctness of the characterization, we ensure the correctness of the method for obtaining explanations.