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Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are popular because they provide a paradigm that naturally meets the current demand to design and implement distributed intelligent systems. When developing a multi-agent application, it is common to use ontologies to provide the domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary necessary for agents to achieve the system goals. In this paper, we propose an approach in which agents can query semantic reasoners and use the received inferences to build explanations for such reasoning. Also, thanks to an internal representation of inference rules used to build explanations, in the form of argumentation schemes, agents are able to reason and make decisions based on the answers from the semantic reasoner. Furthermore, agents can communicate the built explanation to other agents and humans, using computational or natural language representations of arguments. Our approach paves the way towards multi-agent systems able to provide explanations from the reasoning carried out by semantic reasoners.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that argumentation schemes are modelled as agents beliefs, and the annotation [as(as_name)] is used to distinguish argumentation schemes from other beliefs.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/smart-pucrs/Dial4JaCa.

  3. 3.

    Frequently, they are not easily understood even by users of those technologies.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/owlcs/owlapi.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/Galigator/openllet.

  6. 6.

    All rules are available at https://github.com/DeboraEngelmann/explaining-ontological-reasoning/blob/main/base_rules.md.

  7. 7.

    We omitted the premises of argumentation schemes we did not present in this paper. All argumentation schemes are available in the GitHub repository.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by CNPq and CAPES.

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Correspondence to Alison R. Panisson .

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Ferreira, C.E.A., Panisson, A.R., Engelmann, D.C., Vieira, R., Mascardi, V., Bordini, R.H. (2022). Explaining Semantic Reasoning Using Argumentation. In: Dignum, F., Mathieu, P., Corchado, J.M., De La Prieta, F. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13616. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18192-4_13

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