Using argumentation to reason about trust and belief 1

Author： Tang Yuqing Cai Kai McBurney Peter Sklar Elizabeth Parsons Simon

ISSN： 1465-363X

Source： Journal of Logic and Computation, Vol.22, Iss.5, 2012-10, pp. : 979-1018

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Abstract

Trust is a mechanism for managing the uncertainty about autonomous entities and the information they store, and so can play an important role in any decentralized system. As a result, trust has been widely studied in multi-agent systems and related fields such as the semantic web. Here, we introduce a formal system of argumentation that can be used to reason using information about trust. This system is described as a set of graphs, which makes it possible to combine our approach with conventional representations of trust between individuals where the relationships between individuals are given in the form of a graph. The resulting system can easily relate the grounds of an argument to the agent that supplied the information, and can be used as the basis to compute Dungian notions of acceptability that take trust into account. We explore some of the properties of these argumentation graphs, examine the computation of trust and belief in the graphs and illustrate the capabilities of the system on an example from the trust literature.