Abstract argumentation frameworks with strong and weak constraints

Abstract

Dealing with controversial information is an important issue in several application contexts. Formal argumentation enables reasoning on arguments for and against a claim to decide on an outcome. Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF) has emerged as a central formalism in argument-based reasoning. Key aspects of the success and popularity of Dung's framework include its simplicity and expressiveness. Integrity constraints help to express domain knowledge in a compact and natural way, thus keeping easy the modeling task even for problems that otherwise would be hard to encode within an AF. In this paper, we first explore two intuitive semantics based on Kleene and Lukasiewicz logics, respectively, for AF augmented with (strong) constraints—the resulting argumentation framework is called Constrained AF (CAF). Then, we propose a new argumentation framework called Weak constrained AF (WAF) that enhances CAF with weak constraints. Intuitively, these constraints can be used to find “optimal” solutions to problems defined through CAF. We provide a detailed complexity analysis of CAF and WAF, showing that strong constraints do not increase the expressive power of AF in most cases, while weak constraints systematically increase the expressive power of CAF (and AF) under several well-known argumentation semantics.