A General Account of Argumentation with Preferences
This work addresses foundational issues in computational argumentation for AI researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ASPIC+ formalism.
The paper extends the ASPIC+ formalism to create a general framework for argumentation with preferences, revising conflict-free sets and adapting it for broader logics, and shows that it satisfies key properties and accommodates classical logic instantiations.
This paper builds on the recent ASPIC+ formalism, to develop a general framework for argumentation with preferences. We motivate a revised definition of conflict free sets of arguments, adapt ASPIC+ to accommodate a broader range of instantiating logics, and show that under some assumptions, the resulting framework satisfies key properties and rationality postulates. We then show that the generalised framework accommodates Tarskian logic instantiations extended with preferences, and then study instantiations of the framework by classical logic approaches to argumentation. We conclude by arguing that ASPIC+'s modelling of defeasible inference rules further testifies to the generality of the framework, and then examine and counter recent critiques of Dung's framework and its extensions to accommodate preferences.