Automated eligibility systems increasingly determine access to essential public benefits, but the explanations they generate often fail to reflect the legal rules that authorize those decisions. This thesis develops a legally grounded explainability framework that links system-generated decision justifications to the statutory constraints of CalFresh, California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The framework combines a structured ontology of eligibility requirements derived from the state's Manual of Policies and Procedures (MPP), a rule extraction pipeline that expresses statutory logic in a verifiable formal representation, and a solver-based reasoning layer to evaluate whether the explanation aligns with governing law. Case evaluations demonstrate the framework's ability to detect legally inconsistent explanations, highlight violated eligibility rules, and support procedural accountability by making the basis of automated determinations traceable and contestable.

翻译：自动化资格认定系统日益决定着人们获取基本公共福利的途径，但其所生成的解释往往未能反映授权这些决定的法律规则。本论文开发了一个基于法律的、具有可解释性的框架，该框架将系统生成的决策理由与加利福尼亚州补充营养援助计划（CalFresh）的法定约束条件相连接。该框架结合了源自州《政策与程序手册》（MPP）的资格要求结构化本体、一个将法定逻辑表达为可验证形式化表示的规则提取管道，以及一个基于求解器的推理层，用于评估解释是否符合管理法律。案例评估表明，该框架能够检测法律上不一致的解释，突出被违反的资格规则，并通过使自动化判定的依据可追溯和可质疑来支持程序问责性。