Using argumentation to reason about trust and belief

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 multiagent 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.

Trust and argumentation in multi-agent systems

“…Argumentation can help with this. The work by Stranders et al (2008) is aimed specifically at this, but other works have visual representations of the arguments that could be seen as early prototypes on how to display this information to the user (Koster et al, 2012a;Tang et al, 2012;Villata et al, 2013). Nevertheless, while all these models allow for insight into the agent's reasoning process, a lot more work has to be done to make the communication to the user clear, or better yet, interactive.…”

“…Finally, the models for belief revision (da Costa Pereira et al, 2011;Tamargo et al, 2012;Tang et al, 2012) do not provide formal proofs about the logical properties of the revision operator they define. While they clearly reject some of the AGM postulates, it is not necessary to reject all of them, and some weaker version of the original postulates might be useful.…”

Argument schemes for reasoning about trust

“…Further work in this line Tang, Cai, McBurney, Sklar, & Parsons, 2012) has provided logic-based representations to reason about trust, and it is shown how this can be combined with reasoning about beliefs. Although the formal systems presented in Parsons et al (2011) and Tang et al (2012) are incomplete, they make progress towards showing how trust can be represented as a form of argumentation and the work has led to a prototype reasoning system (Tang, Cai, Sklar, & Parsons, 2011) which has continued to evolve (Parsons, Sklar, Salvitt, Wall, & Li, 2013).…”

An argumentation-based approach for reasoning about trust in information sources

“…An argumentation-based model for reasoning about inconsistent and uncertain information was proposed in Tang, Cai, McBurney, Sklar, and Parsons (2012). It is as an instantiation of the preference-based argumentation framework proposed in Amgoud and Cayrol (2002) where arguments do not necessarily have the same strengths and are thus compared using a binary relation expressing preferences.…”

“…Our formalism is based on a richer model of trust. It distinguishes between six forms of trusts instead of an absolute trust in Tang et al (2012). Moreover, our formalism not only uses trusted information in order to infer new beliefs but also reasons about trust itself and infers beliefs about trust.…”