Synopsis/Call

Decision-making and opinion-forming are everyday tasks that involve weighing pro and con arguments for or against different options. Our goal is to foster the development of technologies that support people in decision-making and opinion-forming and to improve our understanding of these processes. We invite you to participate in the 6th Touché lab on argumentation at CLEF 2025 featuring four tasks.

Register for participation Join the Touché mailing list

Shared Tasks

Important Dates

Subscribe to the Touché mailing list to receive notifications.

  • 2024-11: CLEF Registration opened [register]
  • 2025-05-23: Approaches submission deadline
  • 2025-05-30: Participant paper submission [paper template + submission instructions]
  • 2025-06-10: Peer review notification
  • 2025-07-07: Camera-ready participant papers submission
  • 2025-09-09 and 2025-09-10:Touché Workshop at the CLEF Conference in Madrid

All deadlines are 23:59 CEST (UTC+2).

Keynote

Truthfulness and Critical Reasoning in Automatic Argumentation with LLMs
Rodrigo Agerri and Blanca Calvo Figueras
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), HiTZ center

Automatic Argumentation faces new challenges in the LLMs era, including truthfulness, integration of external knowledge for counterargumentation and the fostering of critical reasoning. Central to our approach is the automatic generation of Critical Questions that systematically evaluate LLMs' argumentative reasoning by identifying logical weaknesses and challenging argument validity. This critical questioning framework serves as both an evaluation mechanism and a tool for enhancing automatic argumentation systems. Our findings reveal that truthful counterargumentation requires factual accuracy, logical reasoning, and critical evaluation capabilities, which may be facilitated by automated Critical Questions Generation systems.

Significant challenges remain in evaluation methodology and cultural sensitivity, highlighting the essential role of critical argumentation frameworks in developing more reliable and logically rigorous language models across diverse linguistic contexts.

Rodrigo Agerri, PhD in Computer Science (City, University of London), is the Head of the Text Analysis research area at the HiTZ Center. Involved in more than 40 research projects internationally funded, his research is currently focused on LLMs for cross-lingual information extraction and text generation. He regularly publishes and serves as Area Chair in the main NLP conferences (ACL, EMNLP, etc.). At the moment, he is the PI of several research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, including "DISARGUE", on argumentation-based approaches to counteract misinformation" and “DeepMinor”, on the development and benchmarking of LLMs for low-resource languages in multilingual contexts.

Blanca Calvo Figueras is a PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She is interested in the dissemination of narratives, opinion mining, and the argumentation process. She studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and later joined the NLP field studying the European Masters in Language and Communication Technologies. She has since been a researcher in Vicomtech, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and now the HiTZ center (EHU). Her PhD focuses on using argumentation mining technologies to enhance critical thinking.

Program

Touché is part of the CLEF 2025 conference program. All session times below are given in Madrid local time (CEST). Touché is also featured in the CLEF Lab Overviews session September 9, 11:30-13:15, in Salón de Actos - Facultad de Educación.

Tuesday, September 9, in Florentino Sanz - Facultad de Educación
14:15-15:45Touché Session 1
14:15-14:30 Welcome
14:30-15:45
Keynote
Truthfulness and Critical Reasoning in Automatic Argumentation with LLMs
Rodrigo Agerri and Blanca Calvo Figueras
15:45-16:30Coffee Break and Poster Session
15:45-16:30 SINAI at Touché: From Generation to Evaluation through Multistep and Comparative Prompting for Retrieval-Augmented Debate
María Estrella Vallecillo-Rodríguez, María Teresa Martín-Valdivia and Arturo Montejo-Ráez
15:45-16:30 Git Gud at Touché: Unified RAG Pipeline for Native Ad Generation and Detection
Sameer Kamani, Muhammad Taqi, Ansab Chaudhry, Ahmed Hanif, Abdul Samad and Faisal Alvi
16:30-18:00Touché Session 2
16:30-16:40 Overview of the Image Retrieval/Generation for Arguments Task [paper]
16:40-16:55 Infotec+CentroGEO at Touché: MCIP, CLIP and SBERT as Retrieval Score
Tania Ramirez-Delreal, Daniela Moctezuma, Guillermo Ruiz, Mario Graff and Eric Tellez
16:55-17:05 Overview of the Advertisement in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Task [paper]
17:05-17:20 Git Gud at Touché: Unified RAG Pipeline for Native Ad Generation and Detection
Sameer Kamani, Muhammad Taqi, Ansab Chaudhry, Ahmed Hanif, Abdul Samad and Faisal Alvi
17:20-17:35 TeamCMU at Touché: Adversarial Co-Evolution for Advertisement Integration and Detection in Conversational Search
To Eun Kim, João Coelho, Gbemileke Onilude and Jai Singh
17:35-17:50 JU-NLP at Touché: Covert Advertisement in Conversational AI-Generation and Detection Strategies
Arka Dutta, Agrik Majumdar, Sombrata Biswas, Dipankar Das and Sivaji Bandhopadhay
17:50-18:00 Open Discussion
Wednesday, September 10, in Florentino Sanz - Facultad de Educación
14:15-15:45Touché Session 3
14:15-14:25 Overview of the Retrieval-Augmented Debating Task [paper]
14:25-14:40 DS@GT at Touché: Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Debate
Anthony Miyaguchi, Conor Johnston and Aaryan Potdar
14:40-14:55 SINAI at Touché: From Generation to Evaluation through Multistep and Comparative Prompting for Retrieval-Augmented Debate
María Estrella Vallecillo-Rodríguez, María Teresa Martín-Valdivia and Arturo Montejo-Ráez
14:55-15:05 Overview of the Ideology and Power Identification in Parliamentary Debates Task [paper]
15:05-15:20 GIL_UNAM_Iztacala at Touché: Benchmarking Classical Models for Multilingual Political Stance and Power Classification
Jesús Vázquez-Osorio, Luis A. H. Miranda, Adrián Juárez-Pérez, Gerardo Sierra and Gemma Bel-Enguix
15:20-15:35 Munibuc at Touché: Generalist Embeddings for Orientation and Populism Detection
Marius Marogel and Silviu Gheorghe
15:35-15:45 Closing

Organizing Committee