Exploiting Parallelism for Hard Problems in Abstract Argumentation: Technical Report

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parallel algorithm for enumerating preferred extensions in abstract argumentation frameworks, significantly improving performance on large frameworks by leveraging SCC-recursive semantics.

Contribution

It presents a novel parallel algorithm for enumeration in abstract argumentation, utilizing SCC-recursive semantics to enhance efficiency.

Findings

Significant speedup in large frameworks

Increased number of solutions found

Effective utilization of parallel computation

Abstract

Abstract argumentation framework (\AFname) is a unifying framework able to encompass a variety of nonmonotonic reasoning approaches, logic programming and computational argumentation. Yet, efficient approaches for most of the decision and enumeration problems associated to \AFname s are missing, thus potentially limiting the efficacy of argumentation-based approaches in real domains. In this paper, we present an algorithm for enumerating the preferred extensions of abstract argumentation frameworks which exploits parallel computation. To this purpose, the SCC-recursive semantics definition schema is adopted, where extensions are defined at the level of specific sub-frameworks. The algorithm shows significant performance improvements in large frameworks, in terms of number of solutions found and speedup.