CoQuiAAS

CoQuiAAS is an open-source software developed to answer a current need in the Artificial Intelligence community : the ability to solve efficiently inference tasks about argumentation frameworks. Our software provides the sufficient reasoning tools to work with the usual acceptability semantics (Complete, Preferred, Stable and Grounded) and the usual inference tasks (compute one extension, enumerate all the extensions, credulous acceptance and skeptical acceptance).
CoQuiAAS respects the requirements of the International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation.
CoQuiAAS has been developed jointly by three members of the CRIL (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens) and LIPADE (Laboratoire d'Informatique Paris Descartes).
CoQuiAAS is supported the project AMANDE, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as ANR-13-BS02-004 and the Fondation de Recherche pour l'Aéronautique et l'Espace (FRAE).

Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) [Dun95] are directed graphs where the nodes are so-called arguments, and the edges represent some attacks.
Several acceptability semantics allow to decide which sets of arguments, called extensions, are the acceptable outcome of the AF. For these semantics, several inference problems can be studied:

• Computing one extension of a given AF (SE)
• Enumerating all the extensions of a given AF (EE)
• Decide if a given argument is credulously accepted (ie. belongs to at least one extension) by a given AF (DC)
• Decide if a given argument is skeptically accepted (ie. belongs to each extension) by a given AF (DS)

These are the tasks which are currently performed by CoQuiAAS, for the complete (CO), preferred (PR), stable (ST), grounded (GR), semistable (SST), stage (STG) and ideal (ID) semantics.

CoQuiAAS complies with the command-line requirements of the International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation:
The possible input formats are described here:

• ASPARTIX format (apx): each argument is defined by arg(‹name of the argument›) and each attack is defined by att(‹name of the attacking argument›,‹name of the attacked argument›), one by line. Each line finishes with a dot.
  arg(a).
  arg(b).
  arg(c).
  att(a,b).
  att(b,a).
  att(b,c).
• Trivial Graph Format (tgf): each argument is defined by its name, one by line. These definitions are followed by a sharp symbol. Then the attacks are defined by the name of the attacking argument, a blank space and the name of the attacked argument. Each line is a single attack.
  a
  b
  c
  #
  a b
  b a
  b c
• Dimacs format (cnf):
  p af 3 3
  1 -2 0.
  2 -1 0
  2 -3 0

The command-line arguments are:

• -p XX-YY where
  • XX in {EE,SE,DC,DS}
  • YY in {CO,PR,ST,GR,SST,STG,ID}
• -fo format where format in {apx,tgf,cnf}
• -f ‹file path›
• -a param where param is an argument name (useful for credulous and skeptical acceptance)

CoQuiAAS can be used as a library in another software. Help to use it can be found in its documentation.
Currently, CoQuiAAS incorporates the software coMSSExtractor to perform the constraint-based process; it uses the approach described in [GLM14].