Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments - Code and Data

This is the implementation used for the experiments for the following paper accepted at AAAI 2026:Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Balram Tiwari"Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments"Abstract:We introduce the notion of contrastive ABox explanations to answer questions of the type “Why is a an instance of C, butb 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.Description of the Dataset:The code implements a practical method for computing difference-minimal contrastive explanations, and the scripts used to evaluate this implementation. The Readme file gives instructions on how to compile and use the software. We also provide scripts to reproduce the experiments described in the paper, as well as detailed tables of the results.