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
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.
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 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
The paper introduces PSL, a dual‑view framework that enhances large language models for predictive political question answering by leveraging semi‑structured political records. PSL extracts stance signals from actor records in a semantic view and learns structure‑aware actor representations from an interaction graph in a vector view. Experiments on three real‑world datasets show that PSL consistently outperforms baseline methods, with ablation studies confirming the complementary benefits of stance and structure signals.
By Yinan Liu, Zihan Zhou, Zichun Jin, Xinyu Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang