Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11281v1
• Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 13:16:43 GMT
• Title: Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments
• Authors: Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Balram Tiwari,
• Abstract summary: We introduce the notion of contrastive A explanations to answer questions of the type "Why is an instance of C, but b is not?"<n>We analyze the computational complexity for different variants under different optimality criteria, considering lightweight as well as more expressive description logics.
• Score: 10.574275082056593
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We introduce the notion of contrastive ABox explanations to answer questions of the type "Why is a an instance of C, but b is not?". While there are various approaches for explaining positive entailments (why is C(a) entailed by the knowledge base) as well as missing entailments (why is C(b) not entailed) in isolation, contrastive explanations consider both at the same time, which allows them to focus on the relevant commonalities and differences between a and b. We develop an appropriate notion of contrastive explanations for the special case of ABox reasoning with description logic ontologies, and analyze the computational complexity for different variants under different optimality criteria, considering lightweight as well as more expressive description logics. We implemented a first method for computing one variant of contrastive explanations, and evaluated it on generated problems for realistic knowledge bases.

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