An approach to characterize graded entailment of arguments through a label-based framework

Abstract

Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account only the properties related to the intrinsic logical soundness of an argument in order to determine its acceptability status. However, these properties are not always the only ones that matter to establish the argument's acceptability—there exist other qualities, such as strength, weight, social votes, trust degree, relevance level, and certainty degree, among others. In this work, we redefine the argumentative process to improve the analysis of arguments by considering their special features in order to obtain more refined results. Towards this end, we propose adding meta-level information to the arguments in the form of labels representing quantifiable data ranking over a range of fuzzy valuations. These labels are propagated through an argumentative graph according to the relations of support, conflict, and aggregation between arguments. Through this process we obtain final labels that are useful in determining argument acceptability.