PTCG: Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation

Abstract

The ability to generate counterarguments is important for critical thinking and balanced discourse, yet existing approaches typically produce only a single counterargument, failing to capture the diversity and persuasiveness required in real-world debates. To address this limitation, we propose Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation (PTCG), a framework that combines Tree-of-Thoughts-inspired step-wise generation and pruning with speaker persona selection. By estimating the author's persona from the original argument and incorporating speaker personas representing distinct perspectives, PTCG operationalizes perspective-taking and enables the generation of diverse counterarguments. Results from LLM-as-a-Judge, classifier-based assessment, and human evaluations indicate that PTCG shows consistent improvements in both the diversity and persuasiveness of counterarguments compared to baseline methods.