  The study of arguments as abstract entities and their interaction as
introduced by Dung (Artificial Intelligence 177, 1995) has become one of the
most active research branches within Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning. A
main issue for abstract argumentation systems is the selection of acceptable
sets of arguments. Value-based argumentation, as introduced by Bench-Capon (J.
Logic Comput. 13, 2003), extends Dung's framework. It takes into account the
relative strength of arguments with respect to some ranking representing an
audience: an argument is subjectively accepted if it is accepted with respect
to some audience, it is objectively accepted if it is accepted with respect to
all audiences. Deciding whether an argument is subjectively or objectively
accepted, respectively, are computationally intractable problems. In fact, the
problems remain intractable under structural restrictions that render the main
computational problems for non-value-based argumentation systems tractable. In
this paper we identify nontrivial classes of value-based argumentation systems
for which the acceptance problems are polynomial-time tractable. The classes
are defined by means of structural restrictions in terms of the underlying
graphical structure of the value-based system. Furthermore we show that the
acceptance problems are intractable for two classes of value-based systems that
where conjectured to be tractable by Dunne (Artificial Intelligence 171, 2007).
