The Dynamics of Argumentation - DYNARG

Coordinating Institution: Université du Luxembourg
Contracting Partner(s): Université d'Artois, Lens (F)
Other Partner(s): University of Turin (I) , Meraka Institute, Pretoria (South Africa) , British University, Dubai (United Arab Emirates) , Mahasarakham University (Thailand) , Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok (Thailand) , Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (F) , King's College, London (UK) , COST Network
From: 01/10/2009
To: 30/09/2012
Budget: 282,040.00€
Contact(s): Booth Richard , Van der Torre Leon

Summary

Artificial Intelligence is a science that aims to implement human intelligence. For this purpose it studies and conceives the behaviour of rational agents. Pertinent information may however be insufficient or on the contrary there may be too much relevant but partially incoherent information. Different theories have been proposed for decision-making dealing with such information. However the growing development of multi-agent systems needs to handle collective decision and information coming from different sources. Moreover in multi-agent systems, agents need to interact in order to inform, convince, and negotiate with other agents.

Argumentation theory is a suitable theory to support such interactions. It is a process based on the valuation of interacting arguments that support opinions, claims, proposals, decisions, etc of agents. Formally argumentation is a reasoning model based on constructing arguments and determining acceptable arguments. Over the last ten years, interest in argumentation has expanded dramatically, driven in part by theoretical advances but also by successful demonstrations of a wide range of practical applications. DYNARG builds on a common framework recently developed in the European Sixth Framework IST project ASPIC (2003-2007). We will address the following objectives:

  1. Development of an abstract theory of dynamic argumentation theory in which arguments/conflict relations can be added/removed. In particular, we will study how acceptability semantics in argumentation theory evolve when the set of arguments/conflict relations change.
  2. A framework for aggregation of argumentation frameworks for interaction among arguing agents. Since argumentation theory models interaction between different agents, some conflict relations may be expressed by several agents at the same time. Conflict relations between arguments can be considered as constraints between arguments. Thus a network of conflict relations between arguments can be constructed for each agent. We intend to use recent results on merging constraint networks to treat the case of conflict relations expressed by several agents simultaneously.
  3. Development of new notions of distance between argument graph labellings, in order to formally define when the evaluation of one agent on a set of interacting arguments can be said to be “close to” or “far” from that of another. We will apply this notion to the problem of merging conflicting viewpoints of several agents.
  4. Application of the dynamic of argumentation theory to dialogue between agents. We use the newly developed framework to further develop the theory of argument games developed by Prakken and Vreeswijk.
Refereed Scientific Publications
  • Patrizio Barbini, Yining Wu and Martin Caminada, An implementation of argument based discussion, in Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009) (Vol. 2) pp 1425-1426, 2009.
  • Guido Boella, Souhila Kaci, Leendert van der Torre: Dynamics in argumentation with single extensions: attack refinement and the grounded extension, in Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009) (Vol. 2) pp 1213-1214, 2009.
  • Guido Boella, Souhila Kaci, Leendert van der Torre: Dynamics in Argumentation with Single Extensions: Abstraction Principles and the Grounded Extension, in Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2009) pp107-118, 2009
  • Guido Boella, Leendert van der Torre, Serena Villata: On the Acceptability of Meta-arguments, in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2009) pp259-262, 2009
  • Guido Boella, Dov M. Gabbay, Leendert van der Torre, Serena Villata: Meta-Argumentation Modelling I: Methodology and Techniques. Studia Logica 93(2-3): pp297-355 2009.
  • Richard Booth, Thomas Meyer and Chattrakul Sombattheera, A general family of preferential belief removal operators, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Interaction (LORI 2009), pp 42-54, 2009.
  • Martin Caminada and Gabriella Pigozzi, On judgment aggregation in abstract argumentation, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, forthcoming (DOI: 10.1007/s10458-009-9116-7)
  • Stephan Hartmann, Gabriella Pigozzi and Jan Sprenger, Reliable methods of judgment aggregation, accepted for publication in Journal of Logic and ComputationGabriella Pigozzi. Aggregation problems and models: what comes first?. In F. Stadler et al. (eds.), The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science. Berlin: Springer, forthcoming.
  • Gabriella Pigozzi, Marija Slavkovik and Leendert van der Torre, A complete conclusion-based procedure for judgment aggregation, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2009), pp 1-13, 2009.
Project Website