Dispute resolution in legal mediation with quantitative argumentation
This work addresses inefficiencies in decision-making for legal mediation practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing argumentation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient argument updates in legal mediation by introducing the QuAM framework, which integrates parties' and mediator's knowledge to determine goal acceptability, and a new formalism linking goal acceptability to variable values, demonstrated with a real-world example.
Mediation is often treated as an extension of negotiation, without taking into account the unique role that norms and facts play in legal mediation. Additionally, current approaches for updating argument acceptability in response to changing variables frequently require the introduction of new arguments or the removal of existing ones, which can be inefficient and cumbersome in decision-making processes within legal disputes. In this paper, our contribution is two-fold. First, we introduce a QuAM (Quantitative Argumentation Mediate) framework, which integrates the parties' knowledge and the mediator's knowledge, including facts and legal norms, when determining the acceptability of a mediation goal. Second, we develop a new formalism to model the relationship between the acceptability of a goal argument and the values assigned to a variable associated with the argument. We use a real-world legal mediation as a running example to illustrate our approach.