AF-XRAY: Visual Explanation and Resolution of Ambiguity in Legal Argumentation Frameworks

TL;DR

AF-XRAY is a toolkit that visualizes and analyzes legal argumentation frameworks to identify ambiguity sources and support alternative resolutions, aiding non-experts in understanding complex legal reasoning.

Contribution

The paper introduces AF-XRAY, a novel open-source toolkit with layered visualizations and attack classification to explore and resolve ambiguity in legal argumentation frameworks.

Findings

Supports visualization of argument structures and attack roles

Enables identification of critical attack sets for ambiguity resolution

Demonstrated on real-world legal cases with effective explanations

Abstract

Argumentation frameworks (AFs) provide formal approaches for legal reasoning, but identifying sources of ambiguity and explaining argument acceptance remains challenging for non-experts. We present AF-XRAY, an open-source toolkit for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing abstract AFs in legal reasoning. AF-XRAY introduces: (i) layered visualizations based on game-theoretic argument length revealing well-founded derivation structures; (ii) classification of attack edges by semantic roles (primary, secondary, blunders); (iii) overlay visualizations of alternative 2-valued solutions on ambiguous 3-valued grounded semantics; and (iv) identification of critical attack sets whose suspension resolves undecided arguments. Through systematic generation of critical attack sets, AF-XRAY transforms ambiguous scenarios into grounded solutions, enabling users to pinpoint specific causes of ambiguity and explore alternative resolutions. We use real-world legal cases (e.g., Wild Animals as modeled by Bench-Capon) to show that our tool supports teleological legal reasoning by revealing how different assumptions lead to different justified conclusions.