Abstract Dialectical Frameworks. An Overview.

This article describes abstract dialectical frameworks, or adfs for short. adfs are generalizations of the widely used Dung argumentation frameworks. Whereas the latter focus on a single relation among abstract arguments, namely attack, adfs allow arbitrary relationships among arguments to be expressed. For instance, arguments may support each other, or a group of arguments may jointly attack another one while each single member of the group is not strong enough to do so. This additional expressiveness is achieved by handling acceptance conditions for each argument explicitly. The semantics of adfs are inspired by approximation fixpoint theory (AFT), a general algebraic theory for approximation based semantics developed by Denecker, Marek and Truszczyski. We briefly introduce AFT and discuss its role in argumentation. This puts us in a position to formally introduce adfs and their semantics. In particular, we show how the most important Dung semantics can be generalized to adfs. Furthermore, we illustrate the use of adfs as semantical tool in various modelling scenarios, demonstrating how typical representations in argumentation can be equipped with precise semantics via translations to adfs. We also present grappa, a related approach where the semantics of arbitrary labelled argument graphs can be directly defined in an adf-like manner, circumventing the need for explicit translations. Finally, we address various computational aspects of adfs, like complexity, expressiveness and realizability, and present several implemented systems.