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The complexity of logic-based abduction

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Eiter, Thomas, Gottlob, Georg·1995·Journal of the ACM

Abstract

Abduction is an important form of nonmonotonic reasoning allowing one to find explanations for certain symptoms or manifestations. When the application domain is described by a logical theory, we speak about logic-based abduction . Candidates for abductive explanations are usually subjected to minimality criteria such as subset-minimality, minimal cardinality, minimal weight, or minimality under prioritization of individual hypotheses. This paper presents a comprehensive complexity analysis of relevant decision and search problems related to abduction on propositional theories. Our results indicate that abduction is harder than deduction. In particular, we show that with the most basic forms of abduction the relevant decision problems are complete for complexity classes at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, while the use of prioritization raises the complexity to the third level in certain cases.

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Metadata

Authors
Eiter, T., & Gottlob, G.
Venue
Journal of the ACM
Published
1995-01-03
Volume
42
Issue
1
Pages
3-42
ISSN
  • 0004-5411 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-735X
OpenAlex
W2100657934
Cited by
422
References
0
FWCI
10.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The complexity of logic-based abduction. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/200836.200838
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Eiter, T., & Gottlob, G. (1995). The complexity of logic-based abduction. Journal of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/200836.200838

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.