Making Use of Advances in Answer-Set Programming for Abstract
  Argumentation Systems
  Dung's famous abstract argumentation frameworks represent the core formalism
for many problems and applications in the field of argumentation which
significantly evolved within the last decade. Recent work in the field has thus
focused on implementations for these frameworks, whereby one of the main
approaches is to use Answer-Set Programming (ASP). While some of the
argumentation semantics can be nicely expressed within the ASP language, others
required rather cumbersome encoding techniques. Recent advances in ASP systems,
in particular, the metasp optimization frontend for the ASP-package
gringo/claspD provides direct commands to filter answer sets satisfying certain
subset-minimality (or -maximality) constraints. This allows for much simpler
encodings compared to the ones in standard ASP language. In this paper, we
experimentally compare the original encodings (for the argumentation semantics
based on preferred, semi-stable, and respectively, stage extensions) with new
metasp encodings. Moreover, we provide novel encodings for the recently
introduced resolution-based grounded semantics. Our experimental results
indicate that the metasp approach works well in those cases where the
complexity of the encoded problem is adequately mirrored within the metasp
approach.
