# Reasoning about Explanations for Negative Query Answers in DL-Lite

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0575 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.0575/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Signature-Based Abduction with Fresh Individuals and Complex Concepts for Description Logics (Extended Version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00274/) (2021)
- [Connection-minimal Abduction in EL via Translation to FOL -- Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08449/) (2022)
- [ABox Abduction for Inconsistent Knowledge Bases under Repair Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01341/) (2026)
- [How Hard is it to Decide if a Fact is Relevant to a Query?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22422/) (2026)
- [The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics in ELbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19197/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In order to meet usability requirements, most logic-based applications provide explanation facilities for reasoning services. This holds also for Description Logics, where research has focused on the explanation of both TBox reasoning and, more recently, query answering. Besides explaining the presence of a tuple in a query answer, it is important to explain also why a given tuple is missing. We address the latter problem for instance and conjunctive query answering over DL-Lite ontologies by adopting abductive reasoning; that is, we look for additions to the ABox that force a given tuple to be in the result. As reasoning tasks we consider existence and recognition of an explanation, and relevance and necessity of a given assertion for an explanation. We characterize the computational complexity of these problems for arbitrary, subset minimal, and cardinality minimal explanations.