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.
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.
ARGUS is a new agent-based framework for persuasive argument generation that incorporates a Theory-of-Mind Reasoner to model audience beliefs and values. It uses a component-aware planner to break arguments into subtopics, assign rhetorical functions (logos, pathos, ethos, kairos), and guide evidence retrieval during planning. A refinement module iteratively addresses multi-dimensional weaknesses, and evaluations on three benchmarks show ARGUS outperforming strong baselines and effectively shifting resistant audience stances.
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 the Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 persuasion dimensions grounded in psychological and communication theories, implemented with 55 lexicon- and rule-based sub-features. PI is modular, allowing individual detectors to be swapped while preserving its theoretical framework. Evaluations on four English argumentative datasets show that PI provides a shared, lightweight feature space that captures meaningful predictive signals and reveals consistent dimension-level associations with persuasion outcomes, with variations across topics and stances.
arXiv:2606. 01736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly used to draft public-facing arguments, they may flatten public debate by repeatedly introducing the same polished, plausible arguments.
arXiv:2606. 08076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.
The paper proposes a theory for judging post-hoc debates in AI, focusing on properties like reproducibility, robustness, groundedness, and explainability. It evaluates two debate‑judgement methods—LLM judges and formal computational argumentation semantics—finding similar accuracy but noting that argumentation semantics offers stronger formal guarantees. The study suggests that argumentation semantics is a preferable framework for principled debate judges in AI systems.
arXiv:2608.29803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as proxies for human participants in social simulations, yet whether they update their beliefs...
arXiv:2606. 08076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.
arXiv:2601. 19921v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling, yet recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simple majority vote despite higher computational cost.
arXiv:2606. 05330v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can shift human beliefs across high-stakes domains, but most persuasion studies rely on pre/post belief change.
arXiv:2605.28313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks related to reasoning and judgment. However, assessing the quality o...