Optimization of Probabilistic Argumentation With Markov Decision Models

Emmanuel Hadoux (1) , Aurélie Beynier (1) , Nicolas Maudet (1) , Paul Weng (2, 3) , Anthony Hunter (4)

1 SMA - Systèmes Multi-Agents
2 SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering
3 SYSU-CMU Shunde International Joint Research Institute
4 Department of Computer Science

One prominent way to deal with conflicting viewpoints among agents is to conduct an argumentative debate: by exchanging arguments, agents can seek to persuade each other. In this paper we investigate the problem, for an agent, of optimizing a sequence of moves to be put forward in a debate, against an opponent assumed to behave stochasti-cally, and equipped with an unknown initial belief state. Despite the prohibitive number of states induced by a naive mapping to Markov models, we show that exploiting several features of such interaction settings allows for optimal resolution in practice, in particular: (1) as debates take place in a public space (or common ground), they can readily be modelled as Mixed Observability Markov Decision Processes, (2) as argumentation problems are highly structured, one can design optimization techniques to prune the initial instance. We report on the experimental evaluation of these techniques.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Emmanuel Hadoux, Aurélie Beynier, Nicolas Maudet, Paul Weng, Anthony Hunter. Optimization of Probabilistic Argumentation With Markov Decision Models. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jul 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina. ⟨hal-01200822⟩