Contrastive Explanations for Argumentation-Based Conclusions
This work provides a theoretical foundation for contrastive explanations in argumentation, which is incremental but addresses a specific gap for researchers in formal reasoning and AI.
The paper addresses the lack of proper contrastive explanations in formal argumentation, showing conditions under which such explanations are meaningful and how implicit foils can be made explicit.
In this paper we discuss contrastive explanations for formal argumentation - the question why a certain argument (the fact) can be accepted, whilst another argument (the foil) cannot be accepted under various extension-based semantics. The recent work on explanations for argumentation-based conclusions has mostly focused on providing minimal explanations for the (non-)acceptance of arguments. What is still lacking, however, is a proper argumentation-based interpretation of contrastive explanations. We show under which conditions contrastive explanations in abstract and structured argumentation are meaningful, and how argumentation allows us to make implicit foils explicit.