Search

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) represents an active discipline dedicated to clarifying the internal mechanisms of AI systems, thereby fostering stakeholder confidence and advancing the deployment of accountable technology. A primary theoretical hurdle within XAI involves engineering techniques capable of producing clear, accessible interpretations without sacrificing scalability or operational performance in intricate domains. While rule-based methodologies offer a framework for decoding AI-driven conclusions, they are prone to becoming overly complex in dense environments, which diminishes both their comprehensibility and computational scalability. Furthermore, these approaches frequently overlook contrastive logic, which leaves observers unable to discern why a specific outcome was prioritized over alternatives. To resolve this underlying scientific problem, this research investigates the fusion of computational argumentation—a specialized domain of AI that replicates cognitive processes through defeasible reasoning—with rule-based XAI architectures. Computational argumentation provides a mechanism whereby arguments derived from structured rules can be invalidated or withdrawn when confronted with conflicting evidence. Consequently, this framework offers a compelling avenue for refining rule-based systems to yield more transparent AI models. Despite the synergistic benefits of combining rule-based structures with computational argumentation, academic inquiry into their synthesis remains sparse. Accordingly, this paper also targets the practical engineering challenge of realizing this conceptual integration within functional AI software. This investigation utilizes the Logic Learning Machine (LLM)—a specialized rule-extraction methodology—and introduces a modular framework designed to map input rules directly into a structured argumentation network via state-of-the-art argumentation techniques. Empirical evaluations performed on various binary classification problems from the UCI Machine Learning Repository validate the utility of this combined model. The LLM strategy proved highly proficient at extracting a compact, interpretable collection of if-then rules characterized by minimal antecedent premises, all while sustaining strong predictive accuracy across all evaluated datasets. Concurrently, the argumentation-based models delivered classification performance comparable to the native if-then rule configurations, achieving this through a streamlined rule set while offering vastly superior explainability. Ultimately, this work delivers an innovative framework for the automated and streamlined generation of arguments and their internal conflicts directly from raw data, simultaneously addressing fundamental theoretical and practical barriers to propagate argumentation frameworks within the XAI landscape.