3 October 2018, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Ronald de Haan

Abstract

Judgment Aggregation (JA) studies the aggregation of individual opinions on logically related issues into a collective opinion. Computing the outcome of such aggregation procedures is notoriously computationally hard, which is the likely reason that no structured implementation of them exists as of yet. We provide an implementation of JA methods and problems by encoding them into the framework of Answer Set Programming (ASP), which is a logic programming framework intended to model and solve computationally hard problems in knowledge representation and artificial intelligence. These encodings can be used in combination with off-the-shelve ASP solvers to solve JA problems.

In this talk, I will introduce the paradigm of answer set programming, both from a theoretical perspective and from the perspective of how it can be used in practice. I will explain how to encode the setting of judgment aggregation into ASP, and how ASP solvers can be applied to compute the outcomes of various JA procedures and to solve other problems in the setting of JA. Moreover, I will demonstrate how to use these encodings and this implementation of JA methods, and how to play around with it on your own computer.