Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Jing Li, Yu Yin


Abstract
Writing arguments is a challenging task for both humans and machines. It entails incorporating high-level beliefs from various perspectives on the topic, along with deliberate reasoning and planning to construct a coherent narrative. Current language models often generate outputs autoregressively, lacking explicit integration of these underlying controls, resulting in limited output diversity and coherence. In this work, we propose a persona-based multi-agent framework for argument writing. Inspired by the human debate, we first assign each agent a persona representing its high-level beliefs from a unique perspective, and then design an agent interaction process so that the agents can collaboratively debate and discuss the idea to form an overall plan for argument writing. Such debate process enables fluid and nonlinear development of ideas. We evaluate our framework on argumentative essay writing. The results show that our framework generates more diverse and persuasive arguments by both automatic and human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.314
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4689–4703
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.314/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Jing Li, and Yu Yin. 2025. Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4689–4703, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Debate-to-Write: A Persona-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Argument Generation (Hu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.314.pdf