Language is often used strategically, particularly in high-stakes, adversarial settings, yet most work on pragmatics and LLMs centers on cooperative settings. This leaves a gap in the systematic understanding of strategic communication in adversarial settings. To address this, we introduce SDA (Strategic Dialogue Assessment), a framework grounded in Gricean and game-theoretic pragmatics to assess strategic use of language. It adapts the ME Game jury function to make it empirically estimable for analyzing dialogue. Our approach incorporates two key adaptations: a commitment-based taxonomy of discourse moves, which provides a finer-grained account of strategic effects, and the use of estimable proxies grounded in Gricean maxims to operationalize abstract constructs such as credibility. Together, these adaptations build on discourse theory by treating discourse as the strategic management of commitments, enabling systematic evaluation of how conversational moves advance or undermine discourse goals. We further derive three interpretable metrics - Benefit at Turn (BAT), Penalty at Turn (PAT), and Normalized Relative Benefit at Turn (NRBAT) - to quantify the perceived strategic effects of discourse moves. We also present CPD (the Crooked Path Dataset), an annotated dataset of real courtroom cross-examinations, to demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness. Using these tools, we evaluate a range of LLMs and show that LLMs generally exhibit limited pragmatic understanding of strategic language. While model size shows an increase in performance on our metrics, reasoning ability does not help and largely hurts, introducing overcomplication and internal confusion.

Current studies of bias in NLP rely mainly on identifying (unwanted or negative) bias towards a specific demographic group. While this has led to progress recognizing and mitigating negative bias, and having a clear notion of the targeted group is necessary, it is not always practical. In this work we extrapolate to a broader notion of bias, rooted in social science and psychology literature. We move towards predicting interpersonal group relationship (IGR) - modeling the relationship between the speaker and the target in an utterance - using fine-grained interpersonal emotions as an anchor. We build and release a dataset of English tweets by US Congress members annotated for interpersonal emotion - the first of its kind, and ‘found supervision’ for IGR labels; our analyses show that subtle emotional signals are indicative of different biases. While humans can perform better than chance at identifying IGR given an utterance, we show that neural models perform much better; furthermore, a shared encoding between IGR and interpersonal perceived emotion enabled performance gains in both tasks.