In the last decades, most works in the literature have been devoted to study argumentation formalisms that focus on a defeat relation among arguments. Recently, the study of a support relation between arguments regained attention among researchers; the bulk of the research has been centered on the study of support within the context of abstract argumentation by considering support as an explicit interaction between arguments. However, there exist other approaches that take support into account in a different setting. This article surveys several interpretations of the notion of support as proposed in the literature, such as deductive support, necessary support, evidential support, subargument, and backing, among others. The aim is to provide a comprehensive study where similarities and differences among these interpretations are highlighted, as well as discuss how they are addressed by different argumentation formalisms.
Research on the relation between Belief Revision and Argumentation has always been fruitful in both directions: some argumentation formalisms can be used to define belief change operators, and belief change techniques have also been used for modeling the dynamics of beliefs in argumentation formalisms. In this paper, we give a historical perspective on how belief revision has evolved in the last three decades, and how it has been combined with argumentation. First, we will recall the foundational works concerning the links between both areas. On the basis of such insights, we will present a conceptual view on this topic and some further developments. We offer a glimpse into the future of research in this area based on the understanding of argumentation and belief revision as complementary, mutually useful disciplines.
We introduce an application for a general-purpose decision support system in which the user can express conditional preference rules involving several comparison criteria among alternatives. The system uses rules and available evidence to build arguments, performs an argumentation-based analysis to entail the best alternatives, and explains how it arrives at its conclusions.