"Reasoning" with Rhetoric: On the Style-Evidence Tradeoff in LLM-Generated Counter-Arguments

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Verma, Preetika, Jaidka, Kokil, Churina, Svetlana
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Verma, Preetika
Jaidka, Kokil
Churina, Svetlana
author_facet Verma, Preetika
Jaidka, Kokil
Churina, Svetlana
contents Large language models (LLMs) play a key role in generating evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments, yet their effectiveness in real-world applications has been underexplored. Previous research often neglects the balance between evidentiality and style, which are crucial for persuasive arguments. To address this, we evaluated the effectiveness of stylized evidence-based counter-argument generation in Counterfire, a new dataset of 38,000 counter-arguments generated by revising counter-arguments to Reddit's ChangeMyView community to follow different discursive styles. We evaluated generic and stylized counter-arguments from basic and fine-tuned models such as GPT-3.5, PaLM-2, and Koala-13B, as well as newer models (GPT-4o, Claude Haiku, LLaMA-3.1) focusing on rhetorical quality and persuasiveness. Our findings reveals that humans prefer stylized counter-arguments over the original outputs, with GPT-3.5 Turbo performing well, though still not reaching human standards of rhetorical quality nor persuasiveness indicating a persisting style-evidence tradeoff in counter-argument generation by LLMs. We conclude with an examination of ethical considerations in LLM persuasion research, addressing potential risks of deceptive practices and the need for transparent deployment methodologies to safeguard against misuse in public discourse. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Preetika764/Style_control/.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_08498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle "Reasoning" with Rhetoric: On the Style-Evidence Tradeoff in LLM-Generated Counter-Arguments
Verma, Preetika
Jaidka, Kokil
Churina, Svetlana
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) play a key role in generating evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments, yet their effectiveness in real-world applications has been underexplored. Previous research often neglects the balance between evidentiality and style, which are crucial for persuasive arguments. To address this, we evaluated the effectiveness of stylized evidence-based counter-argument generation in Counterfire, a new dataset of 38,000 counter-arguments generated by revising counter-arguments to Reddit's ChangeMyView community to follow different discursive styles. We evaluated generic and stylized counter-arguments from basic and fine-tuned models such as GPT-3.5, PaLM-2, and Koala-13B, as well as newer models (GPT-4o, Claude Haiku, LLaMA-3.1) focusing on rhetorical quality and persuasiveness. Our findings reveals that humans prefer stylized counter-arguments over the original outputs, with GPT-3.5 Turbo performing well, though still not reaching human standards of rhetorical quality nor persuasiveness indicating a persisting style-evidence tradeoff in counter-argument generation by LLMs. We conclude with an examination of ethical considerations in LLM persuasion research, addressing potential risks of deceptive practices and the need for transparent deployment methodologies to safeguard against misuse in public discourse. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Preetika764/Style_control/.
title "Reasoning" with Rhetoric: On the Style-Evidence Tradeoff in LLM-Generated Counter-Arguments
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08498