Disagree and Commit: Degrees of Argumentation-based Agreements

TL;DR

This paper introduces formal models for partial agreements among autonomous agents using argumentation frameworks, analyzing their reliability and impact in dynamic decision-making scenarios.

Contribution

It presents novel degrees of agreement concepts within argumentation frameworks and evaluates their robustness when new information is incorporated.

Findings

Degrees of satisfaction and agreement are formally defined.

Impact of new information on agreement reliability is analyzed.

Implementation provided in an argumentation reasoning software library.

Abstract

In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by their commitment in the future, given no drastic unexpected changes. In this paper, we introduce the notion of agreement scenarios that allow artificial autonomous agents to reach such agreements, using formal models of argumentation, in particular abstract argumentation and value-based argumentation. We introduce the notions of degrees of satisfaction and (minimum, mean, and median) agreement, as well as a measure of the impact a value in a value-based argumentation framework has on these notions. We then analyze how degrees of agreement are affected when agreement scenarios are expanded with new information, to shed light on the reliability of partial agreements in dynamic scenarios. An implementation of the introduced concepts is provided as part of an argumentation-based reasoning software library.