@inproceedings{gampel-etal-2026-need,
    title = "Do We Need Large Models for Argument Classification? Revisiting the Role of Model Compression",
    author = "Gampel, Filip  and
      Olszowski, Rafa{\l}  and
      Pietro{\'n}, Marcin",
    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-1.8/",
    pages = "66--73",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-399-9",
    abstract = "Large language models have improved argument mining substantially, but the associated computational cost complicates deployment, replication, and systematic comparison. We examine how much compression an open-source large language model can tolerate before argument classification quality degrades. Using gpt-oss-20b as the base model, we study pruning with Wanda and post-training quantization under a zero-shot prompting setup. We evaluate compressed variants on three argument-mining resources, namely UKP, Args.me, and ARIES, and contrast their behavior with general language-model benchmarks. The results show a consistent pattern: moderate pruning preserves most of the original performance on argument classification, whereas activation quantization causes larger and more systematic drops. The findings suggest that argument classification is more compression-tolerant than general-purpose evaluation suites, but only up to a point, and they should not be interpreted as evidence that aggressive compression is universally safe. We therefore position compression as a practical way to reduce model cost for argument analysis, while emphasizing that claims about efficiency gains must distinguish between preserved predictive quality and realized runtime speedups."
}