Semantic alignment between specialized normative texts is challenging when equivalent requirements use different terms, syntax, and levels of abstraction. Lexical overlap, distributional embeddings, and semantic similarity capture topical relatedness but often miss the argumentative structure by which normative claims are supported, qualified, and justified. This paper asks whether explicit argument structure adds information complementary to neural semantics for aligning requirements. We treat cross-standard control mapping as argument-aware semantic alignment and build a neuro-symbolic pipeline that combines neural text representations with Toulmin features. An LLM explicitation step identifies claims, grounds, warrants, qualifiers, and backing and reconstructs enthymemes. These feed an alignment model via argument-aware similarity and structural features. On a NERC-CIP to NIST-CSF mapping benchmark, argument-derived features improve alignment over a neuro-symbolic semantic baseline. Feature selection shows especially strong signal from warrant-related features, indicating that the link between a claim and its supporting reasoning is not captured by conventional similarity alone. A compact claim--grounds--warrant subset remains competitive with the full Toulmin feature set. The results give preliminary evidence that argument structure is a useful intermediate representation for aligning specialized normative texts. Cybersecurity standards are used as a controlled testbed, not as proof of domain-independent generalization. The argument graphs produced by LLM explicitation may also support later work on retrieval, reasoning, and explanation over normative text.
Key Point Analysis (KPA) aims to identify a concise set of key points that summarize a collection of arguments together with their prevalence. We argue that KPA is fundamentally a structured prediction problem that requires recovering semantic groupings, generating representative key points, ensuring coverage, and estimating prevalence. Under this formulation, we show that existing KPA benchmarks suffer from limitations in grouping quality, redundancy, coverage, and argument-key point mappings, causing ceiling violation and selection failure in reference-based evaluation. To support future research on true KPA, we introduce a structure-aware, distribution-sensitive benchmark built via a human-in-the-loop re-annotation. Human and LLM evaluations consistently show that the resulting structures yield more coherent groupings, higher-quality key points, better coverage, and more reliable prevalence estimates than existing annotations. We further release several annotation resources to support research on KPA evaluation, argument-key point matching, explainable KPA, and LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, and outline a research agenda for true KPA.
The logical reconstruction of argument graphs from natural language text is challenging because of the prevalence of enthymemes (i.e., arguments with implicit premises). There are natural language processing methods for identifying enthymemes in text, and there are symbolic methods based on abduction for identifying missing premises in a logical representation of enthymemes. However, there is a need for methods to generate implicit premises to logically show a known entailment or contradiction relationship between a pair of statements. To address this, we propose a neuro-symbolic pipeline that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate implicit premises that are translated into logical formulae and used with logical formulae representing explicit premises and explicit claims to show the logical relationships between them (entailment, contradiction, or neutrality). Our approach is evaluated on the Microtext Argumentative Corpus.
Deborah Dore, Greta Damo, Elena Cabrio +1cs.AI cs.CL
Fallacies are arguments that employ invalid reasoning, making their automatic detection critical in sensitive contexts such as high-stakes political debates, where public opinion is shaped. Spotting a fallacious argument requires contextual knowledge beyond its pure surface text. This entails world knowledge pertaining to the subject matter under discussion, as well as knowledge of the relationships that exist between arguments within the argumentative discourse. Prior work on fallacy analysis has shown that argumentative discourse structure can beneficially improve classification performance. However, such structure is typically encoded only as static classifier features, limiting its flexibility. Building on this intuition while addressing this limitation, we introduce a guided retrieval-augmented methodology for fallacy detection and classification that leverages argumentative relations of support and attack to dynamically steer the extraction of relevant documents. We evaluate our approach on the ElecDeb60to20 benchmark across 42 retrieval configurations and 14 models, performing retrieval over a 15GB knowledge base of collected political-related documents. Our approach improves macro-F1 up to 0.864 for fallacy detection and up to 0.725 for classification over non-retrieval baselines. These results show that incorporating external knowledge significantly enhances fallacy detection and classification when retrieval is argumentatively guided.
Iker De la Iglesia, Johanna Ramirez-Romero, Jose Maria Villa-Gonzalez +3cs.CL cs.AI
Clinical NLP evaluation remains dominated by multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which scores only final-answer accuracy and cannot detect when a model reaches the correct diagnosis while grounding it in irrelevant, absent, or contradictory evidence. We introduce MIRA-Ev, a clinical argument mining benchmark built on Spanish Médico Interno Residente (MIR) licensing-exam cases, re-annotated by expert clinicians with span-level premises, claims, and directed support/attack relations, and released in parallel Spanish (native), English, and Basque versions, the first clinical argumentation resource in Basque. MIRA-Ev organizes evaluation into a three-tier task hierarchy: evidence sentence retrieval, argumentative component extraction, and relation classification.
Zlata Kikteva, Artur Romazanov, Annette Hautli-Janisz +1cs.CL cs.AI
Given the current trend to employ large language models (LLMs) in almost any imaginable context, LLM-generated text detection and authorship attribution have become a pressing issue. Prior work has primarily focused on surface-level linguistic features, an approach shown to be susceptible to paraphrasing and other obfuscation techniques. In this paper, we go beyond the linguistic surface, extracting and analysing reasoning structures in LLM-generated texts with the goal of capturing more complex signals of LLM authorship. We propose a graph neural network approach that leverages reasoning graphs extracted by an argument mining pipeline, demonstrating improved robustness and generalisation over a traditional Longformer baseline. Our approach outperforms the baseline by up to 27 percentage points under the obfuscation attacks such as paraphrasing and backtranslation, and 19 percentage points when evaluated on the texts generated by the unseen model versions, simulating real-world conditions in which new LLM versions are continuously released.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.
Bioethical debates increasingly unfold on social media, yet stance detection research lacks large-scale, domain-specific resources for modeling such context-dependent discourse. We present BioStance, a context-aware dataset of 39,600 annotated Post-Comment pairs from Reddit bioethical discussions. BioStance covers six controversial targets across three dimensions of bioethical controversy: fundamental value conflicts, individual liberty versus collective responsibility, and technological uncertainty. Each instance preserves hierarchical conversational context and is labeled by three independent annotators using a three-class stance scheme: Favor, Against, and None. The annotations achieve a mean Krippendorff's $α$ of 0.82, indicating substantial reliability. By combining thematic diversity, conversational structure, and high-quality human annotation, BioStance supports research on context-aware stance detection, argument mining, and computational analysis of bioethical discourse.
Formalizing complex reasoning from natural text is one of the central challenges in computational linguistics. It requires systems to understand not just keywords but also the context and complex reasoning embedded in a text. Current Argument Mining (AM) techniques identify basic claims and premises, yet they often struggle to capture the richer structural information required by advanced schemas such as the Carneades Argumentation Framework (CAF), which incorporates features such as premise types, proof standards, and argument schemes. We address this limitation by introducing CAF-Gen, an automated multi-agent framework designed to enrich shallow argument structures into CAF-compliant argument models. By employing an iterative Creator-Reviewer pipeline, a creator agent's output is validated by a critical agent to ensure structural integrity. This multi-agent collaboration is crucial for mitigating the structural instability typical of single-pass generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that the iterative feedback loop improves the quality of the resulting data and achieves strong alignment with the original annotations, while producing structurally richer models. Our findings show that the multi-agent system can overcome the limitations of single-pass generation, providing a robust methodology for the automated modeling of formal argumentation.
Information disorder is a challenging phenomenon that affects society at large. This phenomenon entails the diffusion of misleading, misinforming, and hateful content online. In different contexts, one aspect of the problem may prevail, but overall, this is a broad problem that requires comprehensive solutions. While each dimension of the problem (hate speech, disinformation, misinformation, etc.) requires in-depth analysis, in this paper, we look into the possibility of argument structure to provide relevant information to link these different areas of the problem. In particular, we focus on the WSF-ARG+ dataset, which consists of white supremacy forum messages annotated in terms of argument structure (premises and conclusion). There, we leverage the checkworthiness and hatefulness annotations of the argument components to obtain insights into the hatefulness of the whole message. Our results show promising insights (up to 96% F1), indicating the possibility of extending this direction in the future to tackle hateful content identification and information disorder countering.