A tool for merging extensions of abstract argumentation frameworks
This is an implementation of some AF merging approaches initially defined in the KR 2016 paper. The tool is available here, and was described in the Argument and Computation paper.
We describe a tool that allows the merging of extensions of argumentation frameworks, following the approach defined by (In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’16) (2016) 33–42). The tool is implemented in Java, and is highly modular thanks to Object Oriented Programming (OOP) principles. We describe a short experimental study that assesses the scalability of the approach, as well as the impact on runtime of using an integrity constraint. In multi-agent systems, merging the beliefs of several agents in order to have a global view of the groups beliefs is an important task [16]. When the agents’ beliefs are expressed through argumentation frameworks [11], there are two options: aggregate the graphs (see e.g. [6,7]), or merge the extensions [8]. Here we present a Java tool that follows this second approach, then allowing the user to reason with the merged beliefs of the group (e.g. for determining whether a given argument is credulously or skeptically accepted w.r.t. the merged beliefs). Notice that the original paper also presents so-called generation operators, that allow to obtain new argumentation frameworks from the merged extensions. This part is not covered by our tool.
@article{argAndComp2022b,title={A tool for merging extensions of abstract argumentation frameworks},journal={Argument {\&} Computation},volume={13},number={3},pages={361--368},year={2022},author={Delobelle, Jérôme and Mailly, Jean-Guy},doi={10.3233/AAC-210014},}
Formalizing dynamics of argumentation has received increasing attention over the last years. While AGM- like representation results for revision of argumentation frameworks (AFs) are now available, similar results for the problem of merging are still missing. In this paper, we close this gap and adapt model-based propositional belief merging to define extension-based merging oper- ators for AFs. We state an axiomatic and a constructive characterization of merging operators through a fam- ily of rationality postulates and a representation theo- rem. Then we exhibit merging operators which satisfy the postulates. In contrast to the case of revision, we observe that obtaining a single framework as result of merging turns out to be a more subtle issue. Finally, we establish links between our new results and previous ap- proaches to merging of AFs, which mainly relied on ax- ioms from Social Choice Theory, but lacked AGM-like representation theorems.
@inproceedings{kr2016,author={Delobelle, J\'er\^ome and Haret, Adrian and Konieczny, S\'ebastien and Mailly, Jean-Guy and Rossit, Julien and Woltran, Stefan},title={Merging of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks},booktitle={15th {I}nternational {C}onference on {P}rinciples of {K}nowledge {R}epresentation and {R}easoning ({KR} 2016)},year={2016},pages={33--42},}