On extended conflict-freeness in argumentation

This paper studies a possibility to represent n-ary conflicts within an argumentation framework having only binary attacks. We show that different instantiations of the abstract argumentation framework defined by Dung use very similar constructs for dealing with n-ary conflicts. We start by studying this procedure on two fully-instantiated systems from the argumentation literature and then show that it can also be formalised on the abstract level. We argue that this way of handling n-ary conflicts has two benefits. First, it allows to represent all the information within a standard argumentation framework, only by using arguments and attacks (e.g. without adding a new component to store the sets of conflicts). Second, all the added arguments have an intuitive interpretation, i.e. their meaning on the instantiated and on the abstract level is conceptually clear.