Splitting Assumption-Based Argumentation Frameworks

Giovanni Buraglio, Wolfgang Dvořák, Stefan Woltran

Keywords: Assumption-Based Argumentation, Splitting, Collective Attacks

Abstract: Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) is a well-established rule-based formalism for modelling and reasoning over debates, with a wide range of applications. However, the high computational complexity of core reasoning tasks in ABA poses a significant challenge for its applicability in practice. This issue is further aggravated when ABA frameworks (ABAFs) are instantiated into graph-based argumentation formalisms, such as Dung's Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) and Argumentation Frameworks with Collective Attacks (SETAFs). In the context of non-monotonic reasoning, a key strategy to address computational intractability is to optimise reasoning over a given knowledge base through divide-and-conquer algorithms. A paradigmatic example of this approach is splitting, where extensions of a given framework are computed incrementally, i.e. restricting the search space to sub-frameworks only, and then combining the obtained results. This approach has been successfully applied to AFs and a parametrised version has been introduced for AFs under the stable semantics. However, the exponential growth produced by the instantiation process might undermine the usefulness of splitting on the argument graphs induced by ABAFs. To address this issue, our work investigates the concept of splitting for ABAFs on the knowledge base rather than on the graph-based instantiations. Furthermore, we generalise splitting to its parametrised version for ABAFs.

Area: Representation and Reasoning (RR)

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Submission Number: 1417