Zeynep G. Saribatur

Address:	Institute of Logic and Computation Favoritenstraße 9-11/192-02 1040 Vienna, Austria
email:
Phone:	+43 (1) 58 801-740070
Room:	HE 03 48
Elsewhere:	TISS address book RG Google scholar dblp LinkedIn

Since May 2026, I am an Assistant Professor of Reasonable Artificial Intelligence at TU Wien. I am also a Hertha Firnberg Fellow (funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF)) at TU Wien, since June 2022. Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Databases and Artificial Intelligence (DBAI) and the Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) groups. I completed my PhD studies in December 2019 as part of the Doctoral College Logical Methods in Computer Science at TU Wien under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Eiter.

My research combines formal logical methods with computational techniques and cognitive perspectives to advance symbolic reasoning systems with abstraction and generalization abilities, while improving human-understandability of their reasoning. I develop theories and methods for abstraction within Answer Set Programming, one of the core formalisms in Symbolic AI, and related logic-based frameworks, to simplify complex reasoning representations while preserving essential details for decision-making. At the same time, I investigate how abstraction affects human comprehension of explanations, thereby connecting logical reasoning with empirical perspectives. My work advances theoretical foundations of symbolic AI while shaping future directions for transparent and cognitively aligned reasoning systems.

News

Two papers accepted at IJCAI-ECAI 2026! In the paper titled "Abstracting the Indistinguishable in ASP" (Main Track), we investigate computational aspects of checking and existence of abstractions, while also giving insights on the difference of interchangeability and indistinguishability. In the paper titled "An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives" (Survey Track), we overview types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, describe their coverage by current theory and tools and identify research directions for future work by pinpointing the gaps.
Two papers accepted at KR 2026! In the paper titled "Beyond Uniform: To Boldly Abstract What Has Not Been Abstracted Before", we investigate relativized uniform abstractions in ASP to relax conditions under which an abstraction over irrelevancy is possible. In the short paper titled "Simple Guess-and-Check Programs: Strong and Uniform Equivalence Meet Again", we define a subclass of normal logic programs where uniform and strong equivalence coincide.
Our paper "The Dual Role of Abstracting over the Irrelevant in Symbolic Explanations: Cognitive Effort vs. Understanding" is accepted to CogSci 2026 as a talk presentation! In this paper, we empirically showed how the theory on abstracting over irrelevancy in ASP enhances human understandability of explanations. I'm very proud of this interdisciplinary collaboration.
We are organizing a workshop on Theory and Methods for Abstraction (THEMA) as part of KR 2026! The workshop aims to bring together researchers from KR and related communities working on their perspective of abstraction in their fields, with the goal of exchanging theories and methods.
We have a new project on learning abstractions for generalized reasoning accepted for funding by the WWTF! We are actively looking for a PhD student. See more details at the project homepage.

Education:

PhD. in Computer Science, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria (2019)

MSc. in Computer Science and Engineering, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey (2014)

BSc. in Mathematics, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (2012)

Professional Activities:

Member of the program committee of

2026: PADL, AAAI, IJCAI, ICLP, KR, NMR
2025: PADL, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ICLP, EPIA, Analogy-ANGLE II, XLoKR, ArgXAI
2024: PADL, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ICLP, EPIA, Analogy-ANGLE
2023: IJCAI, KR, ECAI, ICLP, JELIA, XLoKR
2022: IJCAI-ECAI, KR, XLoKR, ASPOCP, ArgXAI
2021: AAAI, IJCAI (Senior PC), KR, XLoKR, ASPOCP
2020: AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ASPOCP
Subreviewer for ICLP'21, ICLP'18, IJCAI'18, AAAI'16, KI'16, ICLP'13.

Co-chair of the Rule Challenge Track of the 10th International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning (Rule Challenge@RuleML+RR 2026) as part of Declarative AI 2026.

Co-organizer of the workshop on Theory and Methods for Abstraction (THEMA 2026) co-located with KR 2026.

Co-organizer of the Dagstuhl Seminar "Conveying the Essence via Abstraction: From Art to AI" taken place on Feb 22 - Feb 27, 2026.

Sponsorship co-chair of the 4th European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI 2026).

Steering Committee Member and Chair for Sponsorship Committee of KR Inc. (2024-2027).

Sponsorship co-chair of KR 2024 and KR 2021.

Co-organizer of the 16th and the 17th Workshops on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2023 & ASPOCP 2024).

Co-organizer of the workshop on Recent Advances in Collaborative and Argumentative Decision-Making.

Local Arrangements Committee Member of IJCAI-ECAI 2022.

Co-organizer of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Workshops on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP 2019, TAASP 2020 & TAASP 2022).

Award committee member of VCLA International Student Awards (2020, 2021, 2023, 2025).

Co-chair of the student session at the 27th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2015).

Career Breaks

Maternity leaves during July 2021 - May 2022 and May 2024 - March 2025.

Projects:

1/2026 - 12/2029: Principle Investigator, Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) ICT25-044, Learning Abstractions for Generalized Reasoning in AI (LAGER) (with Thomas Eiter and Nysret Musliu as coPI's), € 799,932

6/2022 - 12/2026: Principle Investigator, Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Hertha Firnberg Grant T1315, Abstraction for Understandability of Reasoning in AI, € 246,120

Software

I have developed the prototype tools (ASPARO, DASPAR, mDASPAR) for the abstraction and refinement methodology on ASP programs.

Publications:

Zeynep G Saribatur, Markus Hecher, and Johannes K. Fichte.
Abstracting the Indistinguishable in ASP.
In Proc. 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), August 2026.
Thomas Eiter, Tobias Geibinger, and Zeynep G Saribatur.
An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives.
In Proc. 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Survey Track, August 2026. (To appear)

submitted version

Zeynep G. Saribatur, Johannes Langer, and Ute Schmid.
The Dual Role of Abstracting over the Irrelevant in Symbolic Explanations: Cognitive Effort vs. Understanding.
In Proc. 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), July 2026. (To appear)

pdf

Matthias Knorr, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Ricardo Gonçalves.
Beyond Uniform: To Boldly Abstract What Has Not Been Abstracted Before.
In Proc. 23rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), July 2026.
Wolfgang Dvorak, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Stefan Woltran.
Simple Guess-and-Check Programs: Strong and Uniform Equivalence Meet Again.
In Proc. 23rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), July 2026.

Zeynep G. Saribatur, Johannes Langer, and Ute Schmid.
Effect of Abstraction on Understandability of ASP Explanations: Work in Progress.
In Proc. 8th Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP), November 2025.

pdf

Wolfgang Dvorak, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Stefan Woltran.
Simple Guess-and-Check Programs: Strong and Uniform Equivalence Meet Again.
In Proc. 8th Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP), Novemver 2025.

pdf

Filip Ilievski, Barbara Hammer, Frank van Harmelen, Benjamin Paassen, Sascha Saralajew, Ute Schmid, Michael Biehl, Marianna Bolognesi, Xin Luna Dong, Kiril Gashteovski, Pascal Hitzler, Giuseppe Marra, Pasquale Minervini, Martin Mundt, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Alessandro Oltramari, Gabriella Pasi, Zeynep G. Saribatur, Luciano Serafini, John Shawe-Taylor, Vered Shwartz, Gabriella Skitalinskaya, Clemens Stachl, Gido M. van de Ven, and Thomas Villmann.
Aligning Generalization Between Humans and Machines
Nature Machine Intelligence, 2025.