Credulous argumentation with the disjunctive stable semantics

The relationship between the disjunctive stable semantics and argumentation is rarely explored. In particular, the problem of how to perform argumentation with disjunctive logic programs by the disjunctive stable semantics is still open. This paper attempts to address this problem and a satisfied solution is provided, in which a disjunctive logic program is naturally transformed into an argument framework and the credulous argumentation is characterized as the maximal members of all acceptable hypotheses. In this semantic framework, some interesting results are obtained. In particular, it is shown that the formalism of credulous argumentation can be implemented through the disjunctive stable models. As a result, the work provides not only a new way of performing argumentation (abduction) in disjunctive deductive databases, but also a natural and complete extension for the disjunctive stable semantics.