Frieso Turkstra


2026

We present a new deliberation interface that enables users to engage with multiple large language models (LLMs), coordinated by a moderator agent that assigns roles, manages turn-taking, and ensures structured interaction. Grounded in argumentation theory, the system fosters critical thinking through user–LLM dialogues, real-time summaries of agreements and open questions, and argument maps. Rather than treating LLMs as mere answer providers, our tool positions them as reasoning partners, supporting epistemically responsible human–AI collaboration. It exemplifies hybrid argumentation and aligns with recent calls for “reasonable parrots,” where LLM agents interact with users guided by argumentative principles such as relevance, responsibility, and freedom. A user study shows that participants found the tool easy to use, perspective-enhancing, and promising for research, while suggesting areas for improvement. We make the deliberation interface accessible for testing and provide a recorded demonstration.

2025

This paper presents a new system for generating critical questions in debates, developed for the Critical Questions Generation shared task. Our two-stage approach, combining generation and classification, utilizes LLaMA 3.1 Instruct models (8B, 70B, 405B) with zero-/few-shot prompting. Evaluations on annotated debate data reveal several key insights: few-shot generation with 405B yielded relatively high-quality questions, achieving a maximum possible punctuation score of 73.5. The 70B model outperformed both smaller and larger variants on the classification part. The classifiers showed a strong bias toward labeling generated questions as Useful, despite limited validation. Further, our system, ranked 6 extsuperscriptth, out-performed baselines by 3%. These findings stress the effectiveness of large-sized models for question generation and medium-sized models for classification, and suggest the need for clearer task definitions within prompts to improve classification accuracy.