On Cycles, Attackers and Supporters --- A Contribution to The Investigation of Dynamics in Abstract Argumentation

On Cycles, Attackers and Supporters --- A Contribution to The Investigation of Dynamics in Abstract Argumentation

Ringo Baumann, Markus Ulbricht

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1780-1786. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/245

Abstract argumentation as defined by Dung in his seminal 1995 paper is by now a major research area in knowledge representation and reasoning. Dynamics of abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) as well as syntactical consequences of semantical facts of them are the central issues of this paper. The first main part is engaged with the systematical study of the influence of attackers and supporters regarding the acceptability status of whole sets and/or single arguments. In particular, we investigate the impact of addition or removal of arguments, a line of research that has been around for more than a decade. Apart from entirely new results, we revisit, generalize and sum up similar results from the literature. To gain a comprehensive formal and intuitive understanding of the behavior of AFs we put special effort in comparing different kind of semantics. We concentrate on classical admissibility-based semantics and also give pointers to semantics based on naivity and weak admissibility, a recently introduced mediating approach. In the second main part we show how to infer syntactical information from semantical one. For instance, it is well-known that if a finite AF possesses no stable extension, then it has to contain an odd-cycle. In this paper, we even present a characterization of this issue. Moreover, we show that the change of the number of extensions if adding or removing an argument allows to conclude the existence of certain even or odd cycles in the considered AF without having further information.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Models of Argument
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Non-monotonic Reasoning