An approach to argumentation considering attacks through time

Abstract

In the last decade, several argument-based formalisms have emerged, with application in many areas, such as legal reasoning, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems; many are based on Dung's seminal work characterizing Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AF). Recent research in the area has led to Temporal Argumentation Frameworks (TAF), that extend AF by considering the temporal availability of arguments. A new framework was introduced in subsequent research, called Extended Temporal Argumentation Framework (E-TAF), extending TAF with the capability of modeling the availability of attacks among arguments. E-TAF is powerful enough to model different time-dependent properties associated with arguments; moreover, we will present an instantiation of the abstract framework E-TAF on an extension of Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) incorporating the representation of temporal availability and strength factors of arguments varying over time, associating these characteristics with the language of DeLP. The strength factors are used to model different more concrete measures such as reliability, priorities, etc.; the information is propagated to the level of arguments, then the E-TAF definitions are applied establishing their temporal acceptability. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.