Minimal hypotheses: extension-based semantics to argumentation

Abstract

The emptiness problem of the preferred semantics and the non-existence problem of the stable semantics are well recognized for argumentation frameworks. In this paper, we introduce two strong semantics, named s-preferred semantics and s-stable semantics, to guarantee the non-emptiness of the preferred extensions and the existence of the stable extensions respectively. Our semantics are defined by two concepts of extensions of argumentation frameworks, namely s-preferred extension and s-stable extension. Each is constructed in a similar way to the original semantics. The novelty of our semantics is that an extension of an argumentation framework is considered as a pair of sets of arguments, in which the second element of an extension is viewed as a kind of hypotheses that should be minimized. The s-preferred semantics not only solves the emptiness problem of the preferred semantics, but also coincides with the preferred semantics when nonempty preferred extensions exist. Meanwhile, the s-stable semantics ensures the existence of extensions, and coincides with the stable semantics when the stable extensions exist as well. The relations among various semantics for argumentation frameworks are discussed.