Papers for

online debate platforms

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Framework generates diverse counterarguments using personas and tree search

PTCG: Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation

Abstract: The ability to generate counterarguments is important for critical thinking and balanced discourse, yet existing approaches typically produce only a single counterargument, failing to capture the diversity and persuasiveness required in real-world debates. To address this limitation, we propose Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation (PTCG), a framework that combines Tree-of-Thoughts-inspired step-wise generation and pruning with speaker persona selection. By estimating the author's persona from the original argument and incorporating speaker personas representing distinct perspectives, PTCG operationalizes perspective-taking and enables the generation of diverse counterarguments. Results from LLM-as-a-Judge, classifier-based assessment, and human evaluations indicate that PTCG shows consistent improvements in both the diversity and persuasiveness of counterarguments compared to baseline methods.

Mon 7 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
It’s helpful to see many different responses when someone makes an argument, but most computer programs only come up with one. The authors created a new method that imagines different personality types to respond from and builds replies step by step, like exploring choices in a tree. This helps generate many different, believable counterarguments. Tests by computers and people show this way makes responses more varied and convincing than older methods.
Open → 2609.07120v1