Towards a General Framework for Dialogues That Accommodate Reasoning About Preferences

Argumentation theory provides foundations for distributed non-monotonic reasoning in the form of inter-agent dialogues. However current dialogue models do not accommodate reasoning about possibly conflicting preferences used in arbitrating amongst attacking arguments. We provide a framework for persuasion dialogues that accommodates such reasoning. Agents exchange locutions that implicitly define an ASPIC(+) theory consisting of rules and premises. The theory's defined arguments instantiate an extended argumentation framework (EAF) that accommodates arguments claiming preferences over other arguments, so that evaluation of the EAF's justified arguments determines the outcome of the dialogue. We also evaluate the outcome of a dialogue based on the dialectical status of moves in the dialogue, propose restrictions on dialogue moves and conjecture correspondences between the two outcome definitions.