Benchmarking Argumentative Behaviour of LLMs: A Study of Defences Against Character Attacks
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as argumentative agents in persuasive dialogues, necessitating rigorous evaluation of their debating competence relative to human interlocutors. In this study, we focus on character attacks (ad hominem arguments), traditionally dismissed as fallacies, which play a pivotal role in political persuasive dialogues where ethos often rivals propositional content. Specifically, we investigate whether modern LLMs can replicate human competence to strategically use and respond to such attacks. We analyse a corpus of natural language political dialogues to identify defensive strategies human interlocutors naturally employ in ethos-centred debat...
| Authors | Ewelina Gajewska, Katarzyna Budzynska, Jaroslaw Chudziak |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 September 2026 |
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