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TruthSplit: Operationalizing Conditional Validity in Arguments Through Multi-Perspective Reasoning

Paper · 2026 · Benjamin Stieger, Maximilian Terberger, Thomas Huber et al.

Summary

TruthSplit is an interactive demo system for one gap in argumentation tools. Most tools judge structure, quality or stance and ignore the worldview of the reader. The authors call their perspective-dependent alternative conditional validity: a conclusion can hold under one set of values, assumptions and definitions of contested concepts, yet fail under another.

The pipeline works in several steps:

  • It splits an input text into a claim and premises, which stay fixed across all perspectives.
  • It runs a three-layer NLI check of logical and normative consistency.
  • It prompts an LLM with structured worldview profiles to produce per-perspective reasoning, assumptions and stance.
  • It summarizes value conflicts, assumption gaps, disagreement dimensions and shared ground in interactive visualizations.

The system can use local models or commercial APIs. A small exploratory user study found the divergence views understandable for non-experts. Factor encodings matched expert judgments only moderately, and output quality did not differ noticeably across LLM families. The work matters because it reframes disagreement as a difference in normative starting points rather than a reasoning error.

Key points

  • Six worldview profiles: Libertarian, Religious-Conservative, Ecological Social-Democrat, Populist-Nationalist, Communist and Neo-Reactionary. Each profile holds weighted values, definitions, principles, decision frameworks and scores on 16 ideological dimensions.
  • Expert validation of profiles: experts rated 96 factor–worldview pairs.
    • Overall correlation with implemented scores was r=0.33, rising to r=0.46 for Religious-Conservative and Ecological Social-Democrat.
    • Inter-expert spread was high (mean SD 2.01; 39% of cases differed by ≥5 on a 1–10 scale).
  • Usability ratings:
    • Experts: ease of use 4.67/5, visual appeal 5.00/5.
    • Broader group (n=52): divergence understanding 4.07/5, analysis-mode options 3.47/5, claim extraction 6.67/10.
  • No notable quality gap across LLM families: Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek gave comparable output quality.
  • Availability: the code is released under the MIT license at github.com/unisg-ics-dsnlp/truthsplit. The project is funded by the SNSF (M-Rational project).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of St.GallenSaint Gallen · Switzerland4 works · 45 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Reasoning · 1,426 works

Cite

Cite as Benjamin Stieger, Maximilian Terberger, Thomas Huber and Christina Niklaus. 2026. TruthSplit: Operationalizing Conditional Validity in Arguments Through Multi-Perspective Reasoning. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-demo.64

@inproceedings{stieger2026truthsplit,
  title = {{TruthSplit: Operationalizing Conditional Validity in Arguments Through Multi-Perspective Reasoning}},
  author = {Benjamin Stieger, Maximilian Terberger, Thomas Huber and Christina Niklaus},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-demo.64},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-demo.64}
}

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