The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented framework for detecting and classifying fallacies in political debate transcripts. By dynamically retrieving documents guided by argumentative relations of support and attack, the method leverages external knowledge to improve performance. Experiments on the ElecDeb60to20 benchmark show significant gains, raising macro‑F1 to 0.864 for detection and 0.725 for classification compared to non‑retrieval baselines.
arXiv:2508. 03250v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens.
Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation.
The paper investigates how dense embedding models can be used for stance-aware argument retrieval, a task that requires both topic relevance and correct stance (support or attack) toward a claim. Experiments reveal that current models favor topical overlap and ignore stance, and that contrastive training to fix this bias leads to over-correction, where models focus too much on polarity keywords at the expense of topic relevance. To address this, the authors propose diagnostic word-ablation metrics and a data‑centric solution involving a balanced argument curriculum and LLM‑augmented stance‑inverted arguments, which helps powerful models learn deeper directional logic and improves stance‑aware retrieval performance.
arXiv:2406. 14657v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community.
The paper introduces “Persuasio”, a multi‑agent dialogue platform that uses a formal argumentation theory to adjudicate winners in free‑text debates. Using this system, the authors generated 192 debates on a UK political topic involving humans and large language models (LLMs), and evaluated 22 interlocutors through automated adjudication and 9,702 crowdsourced pairwise judgments across 1,386 annotation instances. The results show a consistent decoupling between subjective persuasiveness—where LLMs dominate—and formal argumentative strength—where humans remain competitive, with multi‑agent and retrieval‑augmented variants widening this gap.
The paper introduces PSL, a dual‑view framework that enhances large language models for predictive political question answering by leveraging semi‑structured political records. PSL extracts stance signals from actor records in a semantic view and learns structure‑aware actor representations from an interaction graph in a vector view. Experiments on three real‑world datasets show that PSL consistently outperforms baseline methods, with ablation studies confirming the complementary benefits of stance and structure signals.
arXiv:2604. 00878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Actor-level stance detection aims to determine an author expressed position toward specific geopolitical actors mentioned or implicated in a text.
arXiv:2608. 11049v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of social media has created vast amounts of political discourse, which provides valuable opportunities to analyze public opinions and identify different political perspectives.
arXiv:2607. 13260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Policy documents shape governance outcomes, but their reasoning is often implicit.
The paper presents an end‑to‑end framework for extracting and clustering trilingual Sri Lankan parliamentary debates in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Using LLM‑based text extraction, multilingual embeddings, and density‑based clustering, the authors recover 30 macro‑topics with a cluster purity of 0.673. The temporal patterns of these topics align with major national events such as the 2019 Easter attacks and the 2022 economic crisis, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness where traditional LDA fails.
arXiv:2608. 13410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parliamentary proceedings are a primary record of democratic deliberation, yet their volume and fragmentation make multi-perspective access difficult for citizens, journalists, and researchers.
arXiv:2606. 31325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: a French-language dataset of multi-hop historical questions derived from parliamentary debates and newspapers of the French Third Republic.