Splitting Argumentation Frameworks with Collective Attacks and Supports

TL;DR

This paper introduces new splitting techniques for bipolar argumentation frameworks with collective attacks and supports, enhancing their modular analysis and linking to structured argumentation.

Contribution

It generalizes existing splitting methods to bipolar frameworks with collective attacks and supports, establishing correctness for various semantics.

Findings

Proposed splitting techniques for collective attacks and supports.

Established correctness of splitting schemata for common semantics.

Extended splitting methods to bipolar argumentation frameworks.

Abstract

This work proposes novel splitting techniques for argumentation formalisms that incorporate supports between defeasible elements. We base our studies on bipolar set-based argumentation frameworks (BSAFs) which generalize argumentation frameworks with collective attacks (SETAFs), as well as bipolar argumentation frameworks (BAFs), by incorporating both collective attacks and supports. Notably, BSAFs establish a crucial link to structured argumentation as they naturally capture general (potentially non-flat) assumption-based argumentation. The increase in expressiveness calls for diverse forms of splitting. We consider splits over collective attacks (thereby generalizing the recently proposed splitting techniques for SETAFs), splits over collective supports, as well as splits over both collective attacks and supports. We establish suitable splitting schemata and prove their correctness for the most common argumentation semantics.