Moving Between Argumentation Frameworks

Abstract argument frameworks have been used for various applications within multi-agent systems, including reasoning and negotiation. Different argument frameworks make use of different inter-argument relations and semantics to identify some subset of arguments as coherent, yet there is no easy way to map between these frameworks; most commonly, this is done manually according to human intuition. In response, in this paper, we show how a set of arguments described using Dung’s or Nielsen’s argument frameworks can be mapped from and to an argument framework that includes both attack and support relations. This mapping preserves the framework’s semantics in the sense that an argument deemed coherent in one framework is coherent in the other under a related semantics. Interestingly, this translation is not unique, with one set of arguments in the support based framework mapping to multiple argument sets within the attack only framework. Additionally, we show how EAF can be mapped into a subset of the argument interchange format (AIF). By using this mapping, any other argument framework using this subset of AIF can be translated into a DAF while preserving its semantics.