Inconsistency Tolerance in Weighted Argument Systems

We introduce and investigate a natural extension of Dung’s wellknown model of argument systems in which attacks are associated with a weight, indicating the relative strength of the attack. A key concept in our framework is the notion of an inconsistency budget, which characterises how much inconsistency we are prepared to tolerate: given an inconsistency budget β, we would be prepared to disregard attacks up to a total cost of β. The key advantage of this approach is that it permits a much finer grained level of analysis of argument systems than unweighted systems, and gives useful solutions when conventional (unweighted) argument systems have none. We begin by reviewing Dung’s abstract argument systems, and present the model of weighted argument systems. We then investigate solutions to weighted argument systems and the associated complexity of computing these solutions, focussing in particular on weighted variations of grounded extensions.

Authors

• Paul E. Dunne
• Anthony Hunter
• Peter McBurney
• Simon Parsons
• Michael Wooldridge University of Oxford

Keywords

• Argumentation
• handling inconsistency
• complexity