Robinson, J., Williams, A.R., Atkinson, K. et al. (1 more author) (2026) Validating Political Position Predictions of Arguments. [Preprint - arXiv]
Abstract
Real-world knowledge representation often requires capturing subjective, continuous attributes -- such as political positions -- that conflict with pairwise validation, the widely accepted gold standard for human evaluation. We address this challenge through a dual-scale validation framework applied to political stance prediction in argumentative discourse, combining pointwise and pairwise human annotation. Using 22 language models, we construct a large-scale knowledge base of political position predictions for 23,228 arguments drawn from 30 debates that appeared on the UK political television programme Question Time. Pointwise evaluation shows moderate human-model agreement (Krippendorff's α = 0.578), reflecting intrinsic subjectivity, while pairwise validation reveals substantially stronger alignment between human- and model-derived rankings (α = 0.86 for the best model). This work contributes: (i) a practical validation methodology for subjective continuous knowledge that balances scalability with reliability; (ii) a validated structured argumentation knowledge base enabling graph-based reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation in political domains; and (iii) evidence that ordinal structure can be extracted from pointwise language models predictions from inherently subjective real-world discourse, advancing knowledge representation capabilities for domains where traditional symbolic or categorical approaches are insufficient.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Preprint |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an open access preprint under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Leeds |
| Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Computing (Leeds) |
| Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Alan Turing Institute Secondment |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Apr 2026 13:42 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Apr 2026 13:45 |
| Published Version: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18351 |
| Identification Number: | 10.48550/arXiv.2602.18351 |
| Related URLs: | |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:240335 |
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Filename: Validating Political Position Predictions of Arguments.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

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