[java] How do I exclude all instances of a transitive dependency when using Gradle?

In addition to what @berguiga-mohamed-amine stated, I just found that a wildcard requires leaving the module argument the empty string:

compile ("com.github.jsonld-java:jsonld-java:$jsonldJavaVersion") {
    exclude group: 'org.apache.httpcomponents', module: ''
    exclude group: 'org.slf4j', module: ''
}