Towards Reasoning and Explanations for Social Tagging

This paper describes a project aiming at enhancing social tagging with reasoning and explanations. So as to keep with the ease of use characteristic of social media, simple explanations are required. A working hypothesis of the work reported in this paper is that simple explanations require simple reasoning. The approach to reasoning presented in this paper is minimalist: First, it precludes involved forms of reasoning such as refutation or excluded middle; second, it does not need (structural) induction. It is furthermore pragmatic: it incorporates negation as failure and an ad hoc and primitive form of paraconsistent reasoning. Because reasoning is kept simple, a simple and intuitive approach to explanation based only on proof trees is possible. This paper outlines the approach to both reasoning and explanations. Finally, it discusses more sophisticated explanation concepts, based on a notion of proof factorization, that are deemed necessary in the application context considered.