English

Validating Political Position Predictions of Arguments

Computation and Language 2026-02-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Real-world knowledge representation often requires capturing subjective, continuous attributes -- such as political positions -- that conflict with pairwise validation, the widely accepted gold standard for human evaluation. We address this challenge through a dual-scale validation framework applied to political stance prediction in argumentative discourse, combining pointwise and pairwise human annotation. Using 22 language models, we construct a large-scale knowledge base of political position predictions for 23,228 arguments drawn from 30 debates that appeared on the UK politicial television programme \textit{Question Time}. Pointwise evaluation shows moderate human-model agreement (Krippendorff's α=0.578\alpha=0.578), reflecting intrinsic subjectivity, while pairwise validation reveals substantially stronger alignment between human- and model-derived rankings (α=0.86\alpha=0.86 for the best model). This work contributes: (i) a practical validation methodology for subjective continuous knowledge that balances scalability with reliability; (ii) a validated structured argumentation knowledge base enabling graph-based reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation in political domains; and (iii) evidence that ordinal structure can be extracted from pointwise language models predictions from inherently subjective real-world discourse, advancing knowledge representation capabilities for domains where traditional symbolic or categorical approaches are insufficient.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18351,
  title  = {Validating Political Position Predictions of Arguments},
  author = {Jordan Robinson and Angus R. Williams and Katie Atkinson and Anthony G. Cohn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18351},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables. Under review

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:44:27.423Z