@inproceedings{heinrich-etal-2026-illustrating,
    title = "Illustrating Arguments with Images Using Aspect-Aware Prompting",
    author = "Heinrich, Maximilian  and
      Anand, Sharat  and
      Kiesel, Johannes  and
      Stein, Benno",
    editor = "Elaraby, Mohamed  and
      Hautli-Janisz, Annette  and
      Romberg, Julia  and
      Musi, Elena  and
      Ruggeri, Federico  and
      Lawrence, John",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Argument Mining and Reasoning",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.argmining-1.7/",
    pages = "52--65",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-399-9",
    abstract = "Images can powerfully strengthen arguments, conveying ideas more immediately and compellingly than text alone. With the rise of text-to-image models, a broad audience can now generate custom visuals to illustrate their arguments. Yet a fundamental mismatch undermines this potential: these models are trained on concrete scene descriptions, while arguments operate at the level of general, abstract principles. Naively prompting such a model with an argumentative text therefore rarely produces images that genuinely illustrate the argument. To address this challenge, we propose an aspect-aware image generation approach. Given an argument, our method first identifies the key aspects that an illustrative image should convey, then constructs a detailed scene description grounded in both the argument and those aspects, and finally generates an image using that scene description as the prompt. A human-assessment evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields images that illustrate arguments significantly better than those produced by naive prompting."
}