Asking the Right Question: Forcing Commitment in Examination Dialogues

We introduce a new semantics for value-based argumentation frameworks (VAFs) - the uncontested semantics - whose principal motivation is as a mechanism with which to refine the nature of objective acceptance with respect to a given audience. The objectively accepted arguments of a VAF w.r.t. an audience R, are those considered justified by all subscribing to the audience, R, regardless of the specific value orderings that individuals may hold. In particular we examine how the concept of uncontested acceptance may be used in examination dialogues. The proposed semantics bear some aspects in common with the recently proposed ideal semantics for standard - i.e. value-free - argumentation frameworks. In this paper we consider applications of the new semantics to a specific "real" example and examine its relationship to the ideal semantics as well as analysing some basic complexity-theoretic issues.