Answer Set Programming for Legal Decision Support and Explanation

The ANGELIC methodology was successfully used to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on a set of logical rules, with significantly better accuracy than the one achieved by machine learning approaches, as well as to explain the results of reasoning, quite valuable in order to make them trustworthy. This work demonstrates a different logic-based approach, based on Answer Set Programming for solving and generating explanations for solutions. The use of a general knowledge representation and reasoning system, where representation and inference are not tightly coupled, allows for using the same representation for inference tasks different from prediction, thus getting more value out of the domain model, and opens for integrating further forms of knowledge.