Connecting Databases with Argumentation

Shekhar Pradhan

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a proposal to give argumentation capacity to databases. A database is said to have argumentation capacity if it has the capacity to extract from the database a set of interacting arguments for and against claims and to determine the overall status of some information given all the interactions among all the arguments. We represent conflicts among arguments using a construct called contestation, which permits us to represent verious degrees of conflict among arguments. Argumentation databases as proposed here give answers to queries which are annotated with confidence values reflecting the degree of confidence one should have in the answer, where the degree of confidence is determined by the overall effect of all the conflicts and interactions among arguments.