An empirical and axiomatic comparison of ranking-based semantics for abstract argumentation

Abstract

Argumentation is the process of evaluating and comparing a set of arguments. A way to compare them consists in using a ranking-based semantics which rank-order arguments from the most to the least acceptable ones. Recently, a number of such semantics have been proposed independently, often associated with some desirable properties. In this work, we provide a thorough analysis of ranking-based semantics in two different ways. The first is an empirical comparison on randomly generated argumentation frameworks which reveals insights into similarities and differences between ranking-based semantics. The second is an axiomatic comparison of all these semantics with respect to the proposed properties aiming to better understand the behaviour of each semantics.