Title
A general semi-structured formalism for computational argumentation: Definition, properties, and examples of application.
Abstract
In the field of computational argumentation several formalisms featuring different levels of abstraction and focusing on different aspects of the argumentation process have been developed. Their combined use, necessary to achieve a comprehensive formal coverage of the argumentation phenomenon, gives rise to a nontrivial interplay between different abstraction levels, so that counterintuitive or undesirable outcomes may result from the combination of formalisms which appear to be well-behaved when considered in isolation. To address this problem we introduce a semi-structured formalism for argumentation, called LAF-ensembles, capturing a set of essential features of structured arguments and define a class of set based argumentation frameworks appropriate to support a semantic assessment of arguments for LAF-ensembles. It is shown that, under suitable assumptions, the combination of a LAF-ensemble and of an appropriate argumentation framework is guaranteed to produce justification outcomes satisfying a set of essential requirements. The generality and usefulness of the proposed approach are demonstrated by illustrating its ability to capture as instances and enhance two structured argumentation formalisms from the literature, namely Vreeswijk's abstract argument systems and Modgil and Prakken's ASPIC+. In particular, a revised version of the latter formalism, properly dealing with generic contrariness and solving significant technical limitations of ASPIC+, is proposed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.artint.2018.01.003
Artificial Intelligence
Keywords
Field
DocType
Structured argumentation,Rationality postulates,Conflicts
Counterintuitive,Argumentation framework,Abstraction,Argumentation theory,Theoretical computer science,Artificial intelligence,Phenomenon,Formalism (philosophy),Rotation formalisms in three dimensions,Machine learning,Generality,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
257
1
0004-3702
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pietro Baroni172250.00
Massimiliano Giacomin278554.15
Beishui Liao311018.07