Tractable Abstract Argumentation via Backdoor-Treewidth

Argumentation frameworks (AFs) are a core formalism in the field of formal argumentation. As most standard computational tasks regarding AFs are hard for the first or second level of the Polynomial Hierarchy, a variety of algorithmic approaches to achieve manageable runtimes have been considered in the past. Among them, the backdoor-approach and the treewidth-approach turned out to yield fixed-parameter tractable fragments. However, many applications yield high parameter values for these methods, often rendering them infeasible in practice. We introduce the backdoor-treewidth approach for abstract argumentation, combining the best of both worlds with a guaranteed parameter value that does not exceed the minimum of the backdoor- and treewidth-parameter. In particular, we formally define backdoor-treewidth and establish fixed-parameter tractability for standard reasoning tasks of abstract argumentation. Moreover, we provide systems to find and exploit backdoors of small width, and conduct systematic experiments evaluating the new parameter.

Authors

• Wolfgang Dvořák
• Markus Hecher
• Matthias König LIACS, Leiden University, The Netherlands
• André Schidler
• Stefan Szeider
• Stefan Woltran TU Wien

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