A survey of different approaches to support in argumentation systems

Abstract

In the last decades, most works in the literature have been devoted to study argumentation formalisms that focus on a defeat relation among arguments. Recently, the study of a support relation between arguments regained attention among researchers; the bulk of the research has been centered on the study of support within the context of abstract argumentation by considering support as an explicit interaction between arguments. However, there exist other approaches that take support into account in a different setting. This article surveys several interpretations of the notion of support as proposed in the literature, such as deductive support, necessary support, evidential support, subargument, and backing, among others. The aim is to provide a comprehensive study where similarities and differences among these interpretations are highlighted, as well as discuss how they are addressed by different argumentation formalisms.

An Axiomatic Approach to Support in Argumentation

“…The distinction between deductive and necessary support has appeared first. Then, several interpretations have been given to the necessary support (sub-argument relation [26], evidential support [23][24][25], backing support [13]). …”

“…In [8], the support relation is left general so that the bipolar framework keeps a high level of abstraction. However there is no single interpretation of the support, and a number of researchers proposed specialized variants of the support relation: deductive support [5], necessary support [21,22], evidential support [23,24], backing support [13]. Each specialization can be associated with an appropriate modelling using an appropriate complex attack.…”

“…These proposals have been developed quite independently, based on different intuitions and with different formalizations. [10] presents a comparative study in order to restate these proposals in a common setting, the bipolar argumentation framework (see also [13] for another survey). The idea is to keep the original arguments, to add complex attacks defined by the combination of the original attack and the support, and to modify the classical notions of acceptability.…”

Generalizations of Dung Frameworks and Their Role in Formal Argumentation

“…We refer the reader to the original papers for further details and to [30] for a survey on various types of support in argumentation. To summarize this section, research on bipolar argumentation frameworks has certainly demonstrated that going beyond the attack relation is interesting and useful.…”

Probabilities on Extensions in Abstract Argumentation

“…Still, this approach is quite expressive, subsumes many other approaches to non-monotonic reasoning, and provides an active research field. Many research topics have been spawned around these frameworks including, among others, semantical issues [3], extensions on support [8], algorithms [7], and systems [23].…”