Argumentation Extensions Enumeration as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem: a Performance Overview

Abstract. Enumerating semantics extensions in abstract argumentation is gener-ally an intractable problem. For preferred semantics four implementations have been recently proposed, CONArg2, AspartixM, PrefSATand NAD-Alg, with significant runtime variations. This work is a first empirical evaluation of the per-formance of these implementations with the hypothesis that NAD-Alg, as repre-sentative of a family of ad-hoc approaches, will overcome in sequence PrefSAT — a SAT-based approach —, CONArg2 — a CSP-based approach —, and the ASP-based approach AspartixM. The results shows that this is not always the case, as PrefSAT has been often the best approach both in terms of numbers of enumeration problems solved, and CPU-time. Moreover, we identify situations where AspartixM has been proved to be significantly faster than CONArg2