Rudra Ranajee Saha

Rudra Ranajee Saha, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Raymond T. Ng

We present a novel approach for claim verification from tabular data documents. Recent LLM-based approaches either employ complex pretraining/fine-tuning or decompose verification into subtasks, often lacking comprehensive explanations and generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose a Multi-Agentic framework for Claim verification (MACE) consisting of three specialized agents: Planner, Executor, and Verifier. Instead of elaborate finetuning, each agent employs a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought setup to perform its tasks. MACE produces interpretable verification traces, with the Planner generating explicit reasoning strategies, the Executor providing detailed computation steps, and the Verifier validating the logic. Experiments demonstrate that MACE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two datasets and performs on par with the best models on two others, while achieving 80--100\% of best performance with substantially smaller models: 27--92B parameters versus 235B. This combination of competitive performance, memory efficiency, and transparent reasoning highlights our framework's effectiveness.

Rudra Ranajee Saha, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Raymond T. Ng

The proliferation of online debate platforms and social media has led to an unprecedented volume of argumentative content on controversial topics from multiple perspectives. While this wealth of perspectives offers opportunities for developing critical thinking and breaking filter bubbles (Pariser 2011), the sheer volume and complexity of arguments make it challenging for readers to synthesize and comprehend diverse viewpoints effectively. We present an unsupervised graph-based approach for community-based argument organization that helps users navigate and understand complex argumentative landscapes. Our system analyzes collections of topic-focused articles and constructs a rich interaction graph by capturing multiple relationship types between arguments: topic similarity, semantic coherence, shared keywords, and common entities. We then employ community detection to identify argument communities that reveal homogeneous and heterogeneous viewpoint distributions. The detected communities are simplified through strategic graph operations to present users with digestible, yet comprehensive summaries of key argumentative patterns. Our approach requires no training data and can effectively process hundreds of articles while preserving nuanced relationships between arguments. Experimental results demonstrate our system's ability to identify meaningful argument communities and present them in an interpretable manner, facilitating users' understanding of complex socio-political debates.