Relational databases as a massive information source for defeasible argumentation

Argumentation provides a sophisticated yet powerful mechanism for the formalization of commonsense reasoning in knowledge-based systems, with application in many areas of Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, most argumentation systems build their arguments on the basis of a single, fixed knowledge base, often under the form of a logic program as in Defeasible Logic Programming or in Assumption-Based Argumentation. Currently, adding new information to such programs requires a manual encoding, which is not feasible for many real-world environments which involve large amounts of data, usually conceptualized as relational databases. This paper presents a novel approach to compute arguments from premises obtained from relational databases, identifying several relevant aspects. In our setting, different databases can be updated by external, independent applications, leading to changes in the spectrum of available arguments. We present algorithms for integrating a database management system with an argument-based inference engine. Empirical results and running-time analysis associated with our approach show that it provides a powerful alternative for efficiently achieving massive argumentation, taking advantage of modern DBMS technologies. We contend that our proposal is significant for developing new architectures for knowledge-based applications, such as Decision Support Systems and Recommender Systems, using argumentation as the underlying inference model.