Argument-based User Support Systems using Defeasible Logic Programming

Over the last few years, argumentation has been gaining increasing importance in several AI-related areas, mainly as a vehicle for facilitating rationally justifiable decision making when handling incomplete and potentially inconsistent information. In this setting, user support systems can rely on argumentation techniques to automatize reasoning and decision making in several situations such as the handling of complex policies or managing change in dynamic environments. This paper presents a generic argument-based approach to characterize user support systems, in which knowledge representation and inference are captured in terms of Defeasible Logic Programming, a general-purpose defeasible argumentation formalism based on logic programming. We discuss a particular application which has emerged as an instance of this approach oriented towards providing user decision support for web search.