A Reduct-based Approach to Skeptical Preferred Reasoning in Abstract Argumentation

We consider abstract argumentation frameworks and, in particular, the problem of skeptical reasoning wrt. preferred semantics, i.e., deciding whether a given argument is contained in every preferred extension of the argumentation framework. We introduce a novel SAT-based approach, building on recent results from the literature, that searches through complete extensions to efficiently decide this problem. It also employs effective simplification procedures to shorten computation times. As our experimental evaluation shows, our algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.