arXiv Computation and Language

Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis

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 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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives

The paper introduces a structured framework for claim-level discourse analysis in dense health narratives, addressing the limitations of existing topic- or sentiment-based representations. It identifies an average of 13.22 atomic claims per minute in social media health videos and proposes tuples that link each claim to thematic aspects, stance, and multidimensional pragmatic attributes. A benchmark of 1,191 manually annotated claims from 60 videos across four health domains is created, and experiments show that large language models perform well on thematic categorization and stance prediction but struggle with high-dimensional pragmatic profiling, indicating a need for task-specific inference strategies.

By Farnoushsadat Nilizadeh, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh, Eduard Dragut
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 24

ARGUS: Theory-of-Mind Guided Argument Generation with Strategy-Aware Planning and Knowledge Grounding

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.

By Zhe Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Fake News Theories: Harnessing Disciplinary Insights for Computational Modeling, Detection, and Explanation

The paper presents a theory-informed computational framework that converts cross-disciplinary theories of fake news into measurable features for automated detection and explanation. By reviewing theories from social sciences, psychology, economics, and more, the authors establish a broad theoretical foundation for computational modeling. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that theory-derived features are predictive, provide interpretable diagnostic signals, and that multi-feature models generally outperform individual features, though gains are modest.

By Zhaoyang Cao, Miriam Metzger, Reza Zafarani
arXiv AI
Oct 12

UkrMeme: Multimodal Explainable Persuasion Detection in Ukrainian Memes

The paper introduces UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasive techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that retains the original visual content. The authors evaluate vision‑language models in a zero‑shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. They also compare Layer‑wise Relevance Propagation and model‑generated token attributions to analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.

By Nazar Andrushko, Vera Schmitt, Veronika Solopova
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

PersuaRL: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Multi-Expert Selection for Persuasive Dialogue Generation in Insurance

arXiv:2609.01188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing digital communication by powering conversational agents deployed across domains such as customer servi...

By Rohan Kirti, Akash Ghosh, Aryan Vats, Niladri Ghosh, Shipra Shriparn, Roshni Ramnani, Anutosh Maitra, Sriparna Saha