Enhancing Statement Evaluation in Argumentation via Multi-labelling Systems

Abstract

In computational models of argumentation, the justification of statements has drawn less attention than the construction and justification of arguments. Significant losses of sensitivity or expressibility on statement statuses can be incurred by otherwise appealing formalisms. In order to reappraise statement statuses and, more generally, to support a uniform modelling of different phases of the argumentation process we introduce multi-labelling systems, a generic formalism devoted to represent reasoning processes consisting of a sequence of labelling stages. In the argumentation context, two families of multi-labelling systens, called argument-focused and statement-focused approach are identified and compared. Then they are shown to be able to encompass several prominent literature proposals as special cases, thereby enabling a systematic comparison evidencing their merits and limits. Further, we show that the proposed model supports tunability of statement justification by specifying a few alternative statement justification labellings, and we illustrate how they can be seamlessly integrated into different formalisms.