An LLM-Based System for Argument Reconstruction

Arguments are a fundamental aspect of human reasoning, in which claims are supported, challenged, and weighed against one another. We present an end-to-end large language model (LLM)-based system for reconstructing arguments from natural language text into abstract argument graphs. The system follows a multi-stage pipeline that progressively identifies argumentative components, selects relevant elements, and uncovers their logical relations. These elements are represented as directed acyclic graphs consisting of two component types (premises and conclusions) and three relation types (support, attack, and undercut). We conduct two complementary experiments to evaluate the system. First, we perform a manual evaluation on arguments drawn from an argumentation theory textbook to assess the system's ability to recover argumentative structure. Second, we conduct a quantitative evaluation on benchmark datasets, allowing comparison with prior work by mapping our outputs to established annotation schemes. Results show that the system can adequately recover argumentative structures and, when adapted to different annotation schemes, achieve reasonable performance across benchmark datasets. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based pipelines for scalable argument reconstruction.

Assessing Good, Bad and Ugly Arguments Generated by ChatGPT: a New Dataset, its Methodology and Associated Tasks

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked concerns about their potential to spread misinformation. As a result, there is a pressing need for tools to identify ``fake arguments'' generated by such models. To create these tools, examples of texts generated by LLMs are needed. This paper introduces a methodology to obtain good, bad and ugly arguments from argumentative essays produced by ChatGPT, OpenAI's LLM. We then describe a novel dataset containing a set of diverse arguments, ArGPT. We assess the effectiveness of our dataset and establish baselines for several argumentation-related tasks. Finally, we show that the artificially generated data relates well to human argumentation and thus is useful as a tool to train and test systems for the defined tasks.