Assumption‐Based Argumentation Equipped with Preferences and its Application to Decision Making, Practical Reasoning, and Epistemic Reasoning

Abstract

The existing approaches that map the given explicit preferences into standard assumption‐based argumentation (ABA) frameworks reveal some difficulties such as generating a huge number of rules. To overcome them, we present an assumption‐based argumentation framework equipped with preferences (p_ABA). It increases the expressive power of ABA by incorporating preferences between sentences into the framework. The semantics of p_ABA is given by extensions, which are maximal among extensions of ABA with regard to the extension ordering “lifted” from the given sentence ordering. As a theoretical contribution of this study, we show that prioritized logic programming can be formulated as a specific form of p_ABA. The advantage of our approach is that not only does p_ABA enable us to express different kinds of preferences such as preferences over rules, over goals, or over decisions by means of sentence orderings but we can also successfully obtain solutions from extensions of the p_ABA expressing the respective knowledge for various applications such as epistemic reasoning, practical reasoning, and decision making with preferences in a uniform and domain‐independent way without suffering from difficulties of the existing approaches.