A Polynomial-time Fragment of Epistemic Probabilistic Argumentation (Technical Report)

Abstract: Probabilistic argumentation allows reasoning about argumentation problems in a way that is well-founded by probability theory. However, in practice, this approach can be severely limited by the fact that probabilities are defined by adding an exponential number of terms. We show that this exponential blowup can be avoided in an interesting fragment of epistemic probabilistic argumentation and that some computational problems that have been considered intractable can be solved in polynomial time. We give efficient convex programming formulations for these problems and explore how far our fragment can be extended without loosing tractability.