Complexity in finitary argumentation (extended version)

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Andrews, Uri, Mauro, Luca San
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Andrews, Uri
Mauro, Luca San
author_facet Andrews, Uri
Mauro, Luca San
contents Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) provide a formal setting to analyze many forms of reasoning with conflicting information. While the expressiveness of general infinite AFs make them a tempting tool for modeling many kinds of reasoning scenarios, the computational intractability of solving infinite AFs limit their use, even in many theoretical applications. We investigate the complexity of computational problems related to infinite but finitary argumentations frameworks, that is, infinite AFs where each argument is attacked by only finitely many others. Our results reveal a surprising scenario. On one hand, we see that the assumption of being finitary does not automatically guarantee a drop in complexity. However, for the admissibility-based semantics, we find a remarkable combinatorial constraint which entails a dramatic decrease in complexity. We conclude that for many forms of reasoning, the finitary infinite AFs provide a natural setting for reasoning which balances well the competing goals of being expressive enough to be applied to many reasoning settings while being computationally tractable enough for the analysis within the framework to be useful.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16986
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Complexity in finitary argumentation (extended version)
Andrews, Uri
Mauro, Luca San
Artificial Intelligence
Logic
Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) provide a formal setting to analyze many forms of reasoning with conflicting information. While the expressiveness of general infinite AFs make them a tempting tool for modeling many kinds of reasoning scenarios, the computational intractability of solving infinite AFs limit their use, even in many theoretical applications. We investigate the complexity of computational problems related to infinite but finitary argumentations frameworks, that is, infinite AFs where each argument is attacked by only finitely many others. Our results reveal a surprising scenario. On one hand, we see that the assumption of being finitary does not automatically guarantee a drop in complexity. However, for the admissibility-based semantics, we find a remarkable combinatorial constraint which entails a dramatic decrease in complexity. We conclude that for many forms of reasoning, the finitary infinite AFs provide a natural setting for reasoning which balances well the competing goals of being expressive enough to be applied to many reasoning settings while being computationally tractable enough for the analysis within the framework to be useful.
title Complexity in finitary argumentation (extended version)
topic Artificial Intelligence
Logic
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16986