Formalization of argument accrual: acceptability semantics and dialectical proof procedure

Abstract

Argumentation is a powerful paradigm able to formalize commonsense reasoning, finding application in different domains such as automated reasoning, decision making, legal dispute, automated negotiation, etc. However, most of these argumentation-based formalizations do not model the notion of argument accrual, which has been recently gaining importance. This thesis defines a novel formalization of argument accrual, including a declarative characterization of this notion and an associated operational characterization addressing computation. The proposed formalization makes contributions to the existing accrual approaches, mainly concerning the answers obtained, answer explanation, accrual evaluation and comparison, and efficiency of computation.