Is your argument still skeptically accepted?

Though there has been an extensive body of work on efficiently solving computational problems for static Dung’s argumentation frameworks (AFs), little work has been done for handling dynamic AFs and in particular for deciding the skeptical acceptance of a given argument. In this paper we discuss SPA [6], an efficient algorithm for computing the skeptical preferred acceptance of an argument (goal) in dynamic AFs. SPA relies on two main ideas: i) computing a small portion of the input AF, called “context-based” AF, which is sufficient to determine the status of the goal in the updated AF, and ii) incrementally computing the ideal extension to further restrict the context-based AF. We discuss experiments showing that SPA significantly outperforms the computation from scratch, and that the overhead of incrementally maintaining the ideal extension pays off.