Justification theory [3] is a unifying theory to capture semantics of non-monotonic logics. Largely thanks to its abstract nature, it is a powerful framework with many use cases. First, it provides a mechanism to define new logics based on well-known principles in a uniform way, as well as to transfer results between domains. Second, it brings order in the zoo of logics and semantics, by enabling a systematic comparison between multiple semantics for a single logic and between different logics, for instance by answering the question whether a certain semantics of a given logic coincides with a semantics of another logic.

Justification theory is a unifying semantic framework. While it has its roots in non-monotonic logics, it can be applied to various areas in computer science, especially in explainable reasoning; its most central concept is a justification: an explanation why a property holds (or does not hold) in a model. In this paper, we continue the study of justification theory by means of three major contributions. The first is studying the relation between justification theory and game theory. We show that justification frameworks can be seen as a special type of games. The established connection provides the theoretical foundations for our next two contributions. The second contribution is studying under which condition two different dialects of justification theory (graphs as explanations vs trees as explanations) coincide. The third contribution is establishing a precise criterion of when a semantics induced by justification theory yields consistent results. In the past proving that such semantics were consistent took cumbersome and elaborate proofs. We show that these criteria are indeed satisfied for all common semantics of logic programming. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Justification theory is a unifying framework for semantics of non-monotonic logics. It is built on the notion of a justification, which intuitively is a graph that explains the truth value of certain facts in a structure. Knowledge representation languages covered by justification theory include logic programs, argumentation frameworks, inductive definitions, and nested inductive and coinductive definitions. In addition, justifications are also used for implementation purposes. They are used to compute unfounded sets in modern ASP solvers, can be used to check for relevance of atoms in complete search algorithms, and recent lazy grounding algorithms are built on top of them. In this extended abstract, we lay out possible extensions to justification theory.