Utilizing ASP for Generating and Visualizing Argumentation Frameworks
This work addresses the automation gap in instantiation-based argumentation for researchers in computational models of argumentation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing systems for evaluation.
The authors tackled the automation of constructing argumentation frameworks from knowledge bases by developing a system using Answer-Set Programming, resulting in a flexible and extensible tool that also enables new visualization methods for answer-sets.
Within the area of computational models of argumentation, the instantiation-based approach is gaining more and more attention, not at least because meaningful input for Dung's abstract frameworks is provided in that way. In a nutshell, the aim of instantiation-based argumentation is to form, from a given knowledge base, a set of arguments and to identify the conflicts between them. The resulting network is then evaluated by means of extension-based semantics on an abstract level, i.e. on the resulting graph. While several systems are nowadays available for the latter step, the automation of the instantiation process itself has received less attention. In this work, we provide a novel approach to construct and visualize an argumentation framework from a given knowledge base. The system we propose relies on Answer-Set Programming and follows a two-step approach. A first program yields the logic-based arguments as its answer-sets; a second program is then used to specify the relations between arguments based on the answer-sets of the first program. As it turns out, this approach not only allows for a flexible and extensible tool for instantiation-based argumentation, but also provides a new method for answer-set visualization in general.