Belief Function Propagation in Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks

Argumentation theory provides a formal framework to represent and analyse debates where participants propose arguments that attack or support others and assign scores expressing their opinions. Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks model such debates by assigning initial weights to arguments and using semantics to compute final scores that reflect attackers’ and supporters’ influence. One of the major challenge is setting appropriate initial weights when debaters’ opinions are uncertain.

In this paper, we introduce a formal approach to uncertainty propagation in Quantitative Bipolar argumentation frameworks by representing initial weights as belief mass functions over a discretized unit interval. We introduce two new propagation models: (i) an exact model that computes final mass functions by combining focal elements of initial weights with parent arguments via bipolar gradual semantics; (ii) a practical approximation that projects the exact mass onto a user-specified partition and reconstructs masses using the Moebius inverse. We prove mathematical properties of the projection and show that the baseline, while computationally efficient, can be overconfident by failing to preserve expectations. Our approximation reduces the exponential complexity of the exact model while satisfying Epistemic Cautiousness, yielding acceptability intervals that contain true theoretical expectations and balancing tractability with theoretical soundness.