arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Benchmarking Argumentative Behaviour of LLMs: A Study of Defences Against Character Attacks

The paper investigates how well large language models (LLMs) can handle character attacks—ad hominem arguments—in political debates. By analyzing natural political dialogues and comparing LLM-generated responses to a corpus of U.S. presidential debates, the study finds that most LLMs favor logical defenses and rarely use ethos-based counterattacks. The authors suggest that safety fine‑tuning limits LLMs’ strategic options, preventing them from fully engaging in realistic political discourse.

By Ewelina Gajewska, Katarzyna Budzynska, Jaroslaw Chudziak
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Hate Meets Facts: LLMs-in-the-Loop for Check-worthiness Detection in Hate Speech

The paper introduces WSF-ARG+, a new dataset that pairs hate speech with check‑worthiness annotations, and presents an LLM‑in‑the‑loop framework to streamline the annotation process. Experiments with 12 open‑weight large language models demonstrate that the framework cuts human effort while maintaining annotation quality. The study also shows that incorporating check‑worthiness labels improves hate‑speech detection performance, boosting macro‑F1 scores for large models by up to 0.213 and averaging 0.154 across models.

By Nicol\'as Benjam\'in Ocampo, Tommaso Caselli, Davide Ceolin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Whitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation

The paper investigates how annotator-style rebuttals can manipulate large language model (LLM) moderation systems, either by whitewashing hateful content as normal or smearing normal content as hateful. Using a rejudge protocol that adds decision‑boundary perturbations and adversarial rationales, the authors show that such rebuttals significantly degrade moderation performance, especially in multi‑turn settings. The study finds consistent, model‑specific asymmetries between the two manipulation directions and demonstrates that explicit reasoning prompts and defensive instructions mitigate but do not eliminate the vulnerability.

By Junyu Lu, Kaiyuan Liu, Jingyi Kang, Deyi Ji, Hailong Zhang, Lanyun Zhu, Qi Zhu, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin