Abduction and Argumentation for Explainable Machine Learning: A Position Survey

This paper presents Abduction and Argumentation as two principled forms for reasoning, and fleshes out the fundamental role that they can play within Machine Learning. It reviews the state-of-the-art work over the past few decades on the link of these two reasoning forms with machine learning work, and from this it elaborates on how the explanation-generating role of Abduction and Argumentation makes them naturally-fitting mechanisms for the development of Explainable Machine Learning and AI systems. Abduction contributes towards this goal by facilitating learning through the transformation, preparation, and homogenization of data. Argumentation, as a conservative extension of classical deductive reasoning, offers a flexible prediction and coverage mechanism for learning -- an associated target language for learned knowledge -- that explicitly acknowledges the need to deal, in the context of learning, with uncertain, incomplete and inconsistent data that are incompatible with any classically-represented logical theory.