Explaining change in quantitative bipolar argumentation

This paper presents a formal approach to explaining change of inference in Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (QBAFs). When drawing conclusions from a QBAF and updating the QBAF to then again draw conclusions (and so on), our approach traces changes – which we call strength inconsistencies – in the partial order that a semantics establishes on the arguments in the QBAFs. We trace the strength inconsistencies to specific arguments, which then serve as explanations. We identify both sufficient and counterfactual explanations for strength inconsistencies and show that our approach guarantees that explanation arguments exist if and only if an update leads to strength inconsistency