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:2606.12186v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjec...
By Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk
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
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.
By Deborah Dore, Greta Damo, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata
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.
MABPD (Multi‑Agent Bias Probing & Detection) is a training‑free pipeline that uses three specialized large language model agents to analyze news articles from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements via a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD imposes an asymmetric burden of proof—biased claims lacking grounded textual evidence receive zero weight—along with role‑weighted voting and post‑consensus verification, replacing task‑specific supervised decision boundaries. Ablation studies show that the debate module alone accounts for up to a 10.6‑point F1 gain, and on the BABE benchmark MABPD attains 83.4% macro F1, within 0.7 percentage points of the supervised state‑of‑the‑art, while achieving 75.0% zero‑shot accuracy on the SemEval 2019 HyperPartisan corpus.
By Garvit Joshi (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Stavya Dhyani (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Jasmine (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Arun Chauhan (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India)
arXiv:2610.15091v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Argument structures represent how individual arguments interact within a discourse. However, leveraging these structures to infer meaningful knowledg...
By Siddharth Bhargava, Sara Tonelli, Patricia Mart\'in-Rodilla
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: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.
By Allen Roush, Yusuf Shabazz, Arvind Balaji, Peter Zhang, Stefano Mezza, Markus Zhang, Sanjay Basu, Sriram Vishwanath, Mehdi Fatemi, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv
The paper investigates how to detect enthymemes—arguments with unstated premises or conclusions—in controversial political tweets about vaccination and immigration. Despite extensive fine‑tuning, models achieve an F1 score of only about 0.67, prompting the authors to propose new evaluation metrics that compare predictions to the full distribution of annotator votes and a model that directly predicts this distribution. The study also shows that models rely on explicit argumentative structure, often missing implicit links that readers must infer, raising concerns for content moderation systems that depend on majority labels.
By Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk
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.
By Yekyung Kim, Yapei Chang, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer
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.
By Louie Hong Yao, Vishesh Anand, Yuan Zhuang, Tianyu Jiang