Truth-Tracking Evaluation in Opinion-Based Argumentation

Abstract

Truth-tracking in collective reasoning systems is a core challenge in domains such as e-democracy, online deliberation, and citizen opinion polling. Our prior work introduced Opinion-Based Argumentation (OBA), a framework modeling both voting and argumentation, along with collective opinion semantics (COS) designed to select sets of arguments that are mutually coherent and aligned with agents' votes. In this paper, we first formally define the truth-tracking problem within OBA. We then introduce VAST, a comprehensive evaluation framework to systematically assess the epistemic adequacy of COS. Our empirical analysis, conducted using VAST, demonstrates substantial variation in their truth-tracking performance across diverse deliberative conditions.