Interactive debugging of non-ground ASP programs

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an expressive paradigm for problem solving. Although the basic syntax of ASP is not particularly difficult, the identification of (even trivial) mistakes may be painful and absorb a lot of time. The development of programs can be made faster and comfortable by resorting to an effective program debugger. In this paper we present a new interactive debugging method for ASP. The method points to a buggy non-ground rule identified by asking the programmer a sequence of questions on an expected answer set. The method has been implemented on top of the WASP solver. The tight integration with the solver allows to avoid efficiency problems due to the grounding blowup induced by modern reification-based debuggers.