Enhancing LLMs in Predictive Political QA with Semi-Structured Data

Yinan Liu, Zihan Zhou, Zichun Jin, Xinyu Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang


Abstract
Predictive political question answering (QA), such as predicting how a political actor will vote, goes beyond factual lookup. External political resources offer rich historical evidence, but rarely contain the answer itself. Existing LLM augmentation methods, including actor-profile-based simulation and knowledge graph evidence injection, improve political reasoning but largely treat external resources as knowledge-based evidence, leaving prediction-relevant signals under-modeled. We identify two complementary signals for predictive political QA: actor stances that capture issue-specific preferences, and high-order structure signals that capture indirect dependencies among political actors. We propose PSL, a dual-view framework that converts semi-structured political records into inference-oriented evidence for LLMs. PSL extracts stance signals from question-relevant actor records in a semantic view, and learns structure-aware actor representations from an actor interaction graph in a vector view. Across three real-world datasets and multiple LLMs, PSL consistently outperforms baselines, with ablations confirming the complementary gains of stance and structure signals.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.414
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
9490–9503
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.414/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yinan Liu, Zihan Zhou, Zichun Jin, Xinyu Wang, Bin Wang, and Xiaochun Yang. 2026. Enhancing LLMs in Predictive Political QA with Semi-Structured Data. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9490–9503, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing LLMs in Predictive Political QA with Semi-Structured Data (Liu et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.414.pdf