Identification of Multiple Logical Interpretations in Counter-Arguments

Wenzhi Wang, Paul Reisert, Shoichi Naito, Naoya Inoue, Machi Shimmei, Surawat Pothong, Jungmin Choi, Kentaro Inui


Abstract
Counter-arguments (CAs) are a good means to improve the critical-thinking skills of learners, especially given that one has to thoroughly consider the logic of initial arguments (IA) when composing their CA. Although several tasks have been created for identifying the logical structure of CAs, no prior work has focused on capturing multiple interpretations of logical structures due to their complexity. In this work, we create CALSA+, a dataset consisting of 134 CAs annotated with 13 logical predicate questions. CALSA+ contains 1,742 instances annotated by 3 expert annotators (5,226 total annotations) with good agreement (Krippendorff 𝛼=0.46). Using CALSA+, we train a model with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to identify multiple logical interpretations and show that models trained with RLVR can perform on par with much bigger proprietary models. Our work is the first to attempt to annotate all the interpretations of logical structure on top of CAs. We publicly release our dataset to facilitate research in CA logical structure identification.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.326
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6429–6444
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.326/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenzhi Wang, Paul Reisert, Shoichi Naito, Naoya Inoue, Machi Shimmei, Surawat Pothong, Jungmin Choi, and Kentaro Inui. 2025. Identification of Multiple Logical Interpretations in Counter-Arguments. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6429–6444, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identification of Multiple Logical Interpretations in Counter-Arguments (Wang et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.326.pdf
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