Interactive Debugging of ASP Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive, query-based debugging approach for ASP programs that helps programmers efficiently identify preferred explanations by using strategic queries, reducing manual effort and improving debugging accuracy.

Contribution

It extends existing ASP debugging methods with an interactive query system that incorporates user preferences to efficiently find the most relevant explanation.

Findings

The system effectively reduces the number of queries needed to identify explanations.

Query strategies can be optimized based on user preferences.

The approach improves debugging efficiency for ASP programmers.

Abstract

Broad application of answer set programming (ASP) for declarative problem solving requires the development of tools supporting the coding process. Program debugging is one of the crucial activities within this process. Recently suggested ASP debugging approaches allow efficient computation of possible explanations of a fault. However, even for a small program a debugger might return a large number of possible explanations and selection of the correct one must be done manually. In this paper we present an interactive query-based ASP debugging method which extends previous approaches and finds a preferred explanation by means of observations. The system queries a programmer whether a set of ground atoms must be true in all (cautiously) or some (bravely) answer sets of the program. Since some queries can be more informative than the others, we discuss query selection strategies which, given user's preferences for an explanation, can find the best query. That is, the query an answer of which reduces the overall number of queries required for the identification of a preferred explanation.