Overview of MM-ArgFallacy2025 on Multimodal Argumentative Fallacy Detection and Classification in Political Debates
Abstract
We present an overview of the MM-ArgFallacy2025 shared task on Multimodal Argumentative Fallacy Detection and Classification in Political Debates, co-located with the 12th Workshop on Argument Mining at ACL 2025. The task focuses on identifying and classifying argumentative fallacies across three input modes: text-only, audio-only, and multimodal (text+audio), offering both binary detection (AFD) and multi-class classification (AFC) subtasks. The dataset comprises 18,925 instances for AFD and 3,388 instances for AFC, from the MM-USED-Fallacy corpus on U.S. presidential debates, annotated for six fallacy types: Ad Hominem, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Emotion, False Cause, Slippery Slope, and Slogan. A total of 5 teams participated: 3 on classification and 2 on detection. Participants employed transformer-based models, particularly RoBERTa variants, with strategies including prompt-guided data augmentation, context integration, specialised loss functions, and various fusion techniques. Audio processing ranged from MFCC features to state-of-the-art speech models. Results demonstrated textual modality dominance, with best text-only performance reaching 0.4856 F1-score for classification and 0.34 for detection. Audio-only approaches underperformed relative to text but showed improvements over previous work, while multimodal fusion showed limited improvements. This task establishes important baselines for multimodal fallacy analysis in political discourse, contributing to computational argumentation and misinformation detection capabilities.
Eleonora Mancini
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Her research concerns artificial intelligence and in particular multimodal deep learning, natural language processing, image and speech recognition.
Federico Ruggeri
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
His research aims to devise Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that learn to generate, distill, and use knowledge from unstructured text.
Paolo Torroni
Associate Professor
Head of the Language Technologies lab. His main research focus is in artificial intelligence, and in particular natural language processing, multi-agent systems, and computational logics.