arXiv AI

Rhetorical Questions in LLM Representations: A Linear Probing Study

The study investigates how large language models encode rhetorical questions by applying linear probes to two social‑media datasets. It finds that rhetorical signals appear early in the model’s representations, are most stable in last‑token embeddings, and can be distinguished from information‑seeking questions with AUROC 0.7–0.8 even across datasets. However, probes trained on different datasets rank target instances differently, revealing that multiple, distinct linear directions capture various rhetorical cues rather than a single shared representation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Who Argues What? Joint Argument-Entity Detection and Classification in Political Debates

The paper introduces DNE‑ElecDeb, an enriched version of the USElecDeb dataset that annotates Debate Named Entities (DNEs) in both argumentative and non‑argumentative spans, and defines Debate Named Entity Recognition (DNER) as a new task. It proposes Joint Argument and Entity Tagging (JAET), a generative framework that fine‑tunes decoder‑only LLMs to insert inline argument and entity tags into debate turns while preserving the original transcript. JAET achieves significant improvements in joint AM+DNER performance (+27.3% relative F1 in the untyped setting and +41.9% in the typed setting) over sequential pipelines, and these gains generalize to Persuasive Essays (+26.6% and +52.7%).

By Lucio La Cava, Stefano Francesco Monea, Sergio Greco
arXiv AI
Jun 17

RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

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.

By Deborah Dore, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Evaluating the Capabilities of LLMs for Persuasive Dialogue

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.

By Jordan Robinson, Angus R. Williams, Katie Atkinson, Anthony G. Cohn
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Embedding Models for Stance-Aware Argument Retrieval

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.

By Angelo Sparacino, Francesca Toni, Adam Dejl
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Reading Between the Lines: Can LLMs Discover the Question Behind the Text?

The paper introduces "question archaeology," an evaluation task that asks models to infer the single, authentic question that motivated a text. It presents a new dataset of commissioned texts paired with their original research questions and distractors, and evaluates both proprietary and open‑source LLMs. Results show newer models outperform older ones, with BERT-based models lagging, and current LLMs even surpassing human performance on this task.

By Claudiu Creanga, Liviu P. Dinu