In our CPEC Young Researchers Colloquium series, we invite young CPEC researchers to present their research to all of CPEC in a short and lightweight talk. We’re happy to announce the following talk:

Friday, November 19, 2:15pm: Nikolai Käfer (Technische Universität Dresden)

Admissibility in Probabilistic Argumentation

Abstract argumentation is a prominent reasoning framework. It comes with a variety of semantics, and has lately been enhanced by probabilities to enable a quantitative treatment of argumentation. While admissibility is a fundamental notion for classical reasoning in abstract argumentation frameworks, it has barely been reflected so far in the probabilistic setting. In this paper, we address the quantitative treatment of abstract argumentation based on probabilistic notions of admissibility which are fully conservative extensions of classical notions of admissibility. Our approach follows the natural idea of defining probabilistic semantics for abstract argumentation by systematically imposing constraints on the joint probability distribution on the sets of arguments rather than on probabilities of single arguments. As a result, there might be either a uniquely defined distribution satisfying the constraints, but also none, many, or even an infinite number of satisfying distributions are possible. We show that standard semantic notions systematically induce such sets of constraints, and so do their probabilistic extensions. This enables them to be tackled by SMT solvers, as we demonstrate by a proof-of-concept implementation. We present a taxonomy of semantic notions, relate it to existing work and illustrate our achievements with a running example from the semi-autonomous driving domain.
The paper is joint work with Christel Baier, Martin Diller, Clemens Dubslaff, Sarah Gaggl, and Holger Hermanns. It’s available at https://proceedings.kr.org/2021/9/.