Weiwei Chen

Weiwei Chen

In many real-life situations that involve exchanges of arguments, individuals may differ on their assessment of which supports between the arguments are in fact justified, i.e., they put forward different support-relations. When confronted with such situations, we may wish to aggregate individuals' argumentation views on support-relations into a collective view, which is acceptable to the group. In this paper, we assume that under bipolar argumentation frameworks, individuals are equipped with a set of arguments and a set of attacks between arguments, but with possibly different support-relations. Using the methodology in social choice theory, we analyze what semantic properties of bipolar argumentation frameworks can be preserved by aggregation rules during the aggregation of support-relations.

Weiwei Chen, Ulle Endriss

An abstract argumentation framework can be used to model the argumentative stance of an agent at a high level of abstraction, by indicating for every pair of arguments that is being considered in a debate whether the first attacks the second. When modelling a group of agents engaged in a debate, we may wish to aggregate their individual argumentation frameworks to obtain a single such framework that reflects the consensus of the group. Even when agents disagree on many details, there may well be high-level agreement on important semantic properties, such as the acceptability of a given argument. Using techniques from social choice theory, we analyse under what circumstances such semantic properties agreed upon by the individual agents can be preserved under aggregation.