Tiziano Labruna

Arkadiusz Modzelewski, Witold Sosnowski, Eleni Papadopulos et al.

The intentional creation and spread of disinformation poses a significant threat to public discourse. However, existing English datasets and research rarely address the intentionality behind the disinformation. This work presents MALINT, the first human-annotated English corpus developed in collaboration with expert fact-checkers to capture disinformation and its malicious intent. We utilize our novel corpus to benchmark 12 language models, including small language models (SLMs) such as BERT and large language models (LLMs) like Llama 3.3, on binary and multilabel intent classification tasks. Moreover, inspired by inoculation theory from psychology and communication studies, we investigate whether incorporating knowledge of malicious intent can improve disinformation detection. To this end, we propose intent-based inoculation, an intent-augmented reasoning for LLMs that integrates intent analysis to mitigate the persuasive impact of disinformation. Analysis on six disinformation datasets, five LLMs, and seven languages shows that intent-augmented reasoning improves zero-shot disinformation detection. To support research in intent-aware disinformation detection, we release the MALINT dataset with annotations from each annotation step.

Tiziano Labruna, Arkadiusz Modzelewski, Giorgio Satta et al.

Detecting persuasion in argumentative text is a challenging task with important implications for understanding human communication. This work investigates the role of persuasion strategies - such as Attack on reputation, Distraction, and Manipulative wording - in determining the persuasiveness of a text. We conduct experiments on three annotated argument datasets: Winning Arguments (built from the Change My View subreddit), Anthropic/Persuasion, and Persuasion for Good. Our approach leverages large language models (LLMs) with a Multi-Strategy Persuasion Scoring approach that guides reasoning over six persuasion strategies. Results show that strategy-guided reasoning improves the prediction of persuasiveness. To better understand the influence of content, we organize the Winning Argument dataset into broad discussion topics and analyze performance across them. We publicly release this topic-annotated version of the dataset to facilitate future research. Overall, our methodology demonstrates the value of structured, strategy-aware prompting for enhancing interpretability and robustness in argument quality assessment.

Tiziano Labruna, Bernardo Magnini

Task-oriented dialogues must maintain consistency both within the dialogue itself, ensuring logical coherence across turns, and with the conversational domain, accurately reflecting external knowledge. We propose to conceptualize dialogue consistency as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), wherein variables represent segments of the dialogue referencing the conversational domain, and constraints among variables reflect dialogue properties, including linguistic, conversational, and domain-based aspects. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we utilize a CSP solver to detect inconsistencies in dialogues re-lexicalized by an LLM. Our findings indicate that: (i) CSP is effective to detect dialogue inconsistencies; and (ii) consistent dialogue re-lexicalization is challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs, achieving only a 0.15 accuracy rate when compared to a CSP solver. Furthermore, through an ablation study, we reveal that constraints derived from domain knowledge pose the greatest difficulty in being respected. We argue that CSP captures core properties of dialogue consistency that have been poorly considered by approaches based on component pipelines.

Tiziano Labruna, Jon Ander Campos, Gorka Azkune

In this paper, we demonstrate how Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively learn to use an off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) system specifically when additional context is required to answer a given question. Given the performance of IR systems, the optimal strategy for question answering does not always entail external information retrieval; rather, it often involves leveraging the parametric memory of the LLM itself. Prior research has identified this phenomenon in the PopQA dataset, wherein the most popular questions are effectively addressed using the LLM's parametric memory, while less popular ones require IR system usage. Following this, we propose a tailored training approach for LLMs, leveraging existing open-domain question answering datasets. Here, LLMs are trained to generate a special token, <RET>, when they do not know the answer to a question. Our evaluation of the Adaptive Retrieval LLM (Adapt-LLM) on the PopQA dataset showcases improvements over the same LLM under three configurations: (i) retrieving information for all the questions, (ii) using always the parametric memory of the LLM, and (iii) using a popularity threshold to decide when to use a retriever. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that Adapt-LLM is able to generate the <RET> token when it determines that it does not know how to answer a question, indicating the need for IR, while it achieves notably high accuracy levels when it chooses to rely only on its parametric memory.

Tiziano Labruna, Simone Gallo, Giovanni Da San Martino

Positional bias in binary question answering occurs when a model systematically favors one choice over another based solely on the ordering of presented options. In this study, we quantify and analyze positional bias across five large language models under varying degrees of answer uncertainty. We re-adapted the SQuAD-it dataset by adding an extra incorrect answer option and then created multiple versions with progressively less context and more out-of-context answers, yielding datasets that range from low to high uncertainty. Additionally, we evaluate two naturally higher-uncertainty benchmarks: (1) WebGPT - question pairs with unequal human-assigned quality scores, and (2) Winning Arguments - where models predict the more persuasive argument in Reddit's r/ChangeMyView exchanges. Across each dataset, the order of the "correct" (or higher-quality/persuasive) option is systematically flipped (first placed in position 1, then in position 2) to compute both Preference Fairness and Position Consistency. We observe that positional bias is nearly absent under low-uncertainty conditions, but grows exponentially when it becomes doubtful to decide which option is correct.

Tiziano Labruna, Sofia Brenna, Andrea Zaninello et al.

Large pre-trained language models have exhibited unprecedented capabilities in producing high-quality text via prompting techniques. This fact introduces new possibilities for data collection and annotation, particularly in situations where such data is scarce, complex to gather, expensive, or even sensitive. In this paper, we explore the potential of these models to generate and annotate goal-oriented dialogues, and conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate their quality. Our experiments employ ChatGPT, and encompass three categories of goal-oriented dialogues (task-oriented, collaborative, and explanatory), two generation modes (interactive and one-shot), and two languages (English and Italian). Based on extensive human-based evaluations, we demonstrate that the quality of generated dialogues and annotations is on par with those generated by humans.