Partial semantics of argumentation

Abstract

In various argumentation systems, under most of situations, only the justification status of some arguments of the systems should be evaluated, while that of other arguments is not necessary to be figured out. Based on this observation, we introduce an efficient method to evaluate the status of a part of arguments in an argumentation framework. This method is based on the notion of unattacked sets of an argumentation framework and the directionality criterion of argumentation semantics. Given an argumentation framework and a subset of arguments within it, we firstly identify the minimal set of arguments that are relevant to the arguments in this subset (called the minimal unattacked set). Then, under an argumentation semantics satisfying the directionality criterion, the set of extensions of the sub-framework induced by the minimal unattacked set (called a partial semantics of the original argumentation framework) can be evaluated independently. Then, we analyze two basic properties of the partial semantics of argumentation: monotonicity and combinability. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.