Persuasiveness of Generated Free-Text Rationales in Subjective Decisions: A Case Study on Pairwise Argument Ranking

Mohamed Elaraby, Diane Litman, Xiang Li, Ahmed Magooda


Abstract
Generating free-text rationales is among the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These rationales have been found to enhance LLM performance across various NLP tasks. Recently, there has been growing interest in using these rationales to provide insights for various important downstream tasks. In this paper, we analyze generated free-text rationales in tasks with subjective answers, emphasizing the importance of rationalization in such scenarios. We focus on pairwise argument ranking, a highly subjective task with significant potential for real-world applications, such as debate assistance. We evaluate the persuasiveness of rationales generated by nine LLMs to support their subjective choices. Our findings suggest that open-source LLMs, particularly Llama2-70B-chat, are capable of providing highly persuasive rationalizations, surpassing even GPT models. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that the persuasiveness of the generated rationales can be enhanced by guiding their persuasive elements through prompting or self-refinement techniques.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.836
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
14311–14329
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.836
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Elaraby, Diane Litman, Xiang Li, and Ahmed Magooda. 2024. Persuasiveness of Generated Free-Text Rationales in Subjective Decisions: A Case Study on Pairwise Argument Ranking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 14311–14329, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Persuasiveness of Generated Free-Text Rationales in Subjective Decisions: A Case Study on Pairwise Argument Ranking (Elaraby et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.836.pdf