The expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) into more serious areas of application, involving decision-making and the forming of public opinion, calls for a more thoughtful treatment of texts. Augmenting them with explicit and understandable argumentative analysis could foster a more reasoned usage of chatbots, text completion mechanisms or other applications. However, it is unclear which aspects of argumentation can be reliably identified and integrated by them. In this paper we propose an adaptation of Wagemans (2016)’s Periodic Table of Arguments to identify different argumentative aspects of texts, with a special focus on hate speech in social media. We have empirically assessed the reliability with which each of these aspects can be automatically identified. We analyze the implications of these results, and how to adapt the proposal to obtain reliable representations of those that cannot be successfully identified.

It has been shown that high quality fine-tuning boosts the performance of language models, even if the size of the fine-tuning is small. In this work we show how highly targeted fine-tuning improves the task of hate speech counter-narrative generation in user-generated text, even for very small sizes of training (1722 counter-narratives for English and 355 for Spanish). Providing a small subset of examples focusing on single argumentative strategies, together with the argumentative analysis relevant to that strategy, yields counter-narratives that are as satisfactory as providing the whole set of counter-narratives. We also show that a good base model is required for the fine-tuning to have a positive impact. Indeed, for Spanish, the counter-narratives obtained without fine-tuning are mostly unacceptable, and, while fine-tuning improves their overall quality, the performance still remains quite unsatisfactory.