Relating ways to instantiate abstract argumentation frameworks

This paper studies the relation between various ways to instantiate Dung’s abstract argumentation frameworks. First the ASPIC framework, which explicitly generates abstract argumentation frameworks, is equivalently reformulated in terms of John Pollock’s recursive labelling method, which does not explicitly generate such frameworks. The reformulation arguably facilitates more natural explanations of dialectical argument evaluation. Then a variant is examined of a recent proposal by Wyner, Bench-Capon and Dunne to instantiate abstract argumentation frameworks without defining explicit inferential relations between arguments. The proposal is reformulated in a way that is equivalent to ASPIC under some limiting assumptions. The proof exploits the equivalence between ASPIC and Pollock’s recursive labellings proven in the first part of the paper.