Intrinsic Argument Strength in Structured Argumentation: a Principled Approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to assign intrinsic strengths to arguments in structured argumentation by considering the premises and inference rules, proposing methods, and analyzing their properties against defined principles.

Contribution

It introduces a principled approach for assigning intrinsic argument strengths based on argument structure, and develops a generalized system for creating new strength assignment methods.

Findings

Proposed two methods for intrinsic strength assignment.

Analyzed methods against a set of defined principles.

Presented a generalized system for developing strength assignment methods.

Abstract

Abstract argumentation provides us with methods such as gradual and Dung semantics with which to evaluate arguments after potential attacks by other arguments. Some of these methods can take intrinsic strengths of arguments as input, with which to modulate the effects of attacks between arguments. Coming from abstract argumentation, these methods look only at the relations between arguments and not at the structure of the arguments themselves. In structured argumentation the way an argument is constructed, by chaining inference rules starting from premises, is taken into consideration. In this paper we study methods for assigning an argument its intrinsic strength, based on the strengths of the premises and inference rules used to form said argument. We first define a set of principles, which are properties that strength assigning methods might satisfy. We then propose two such methods and analyse which principles they satisfy. Finally, we present a generalised system for creating novel strength assigning methods and speak to the properties of this system regarding the proposed principles.