Strategic Dialogue Assessment: The Crooked Path to Innocence
Anshun Asher Zheng, Junyi Jessy Li, David I. Beaver

TL;DR
This paper introduces SDA, a framework based on pragmatics and game theory to evaluate strategic language use in adversarial dialogues, demonstrated through courtroom cross-examinations and LLM assessments.
Contribution
The paper presents SDA, a novel framework with metrics and a dataset for systematically analyzing strategic discourse, bridging pragmatics and game theory in dialogue evaluation.
Findings
LLMs show limited understanding of strategic language.
Model size correlates with performance, but reasoning ability does not.
Overcomplication and confusion increase with reasoning skills.
Abstract
Language is often used strategically, particularly in high-stakes, adversarial settings, yet most work on pragmatics and LLMs centers on cooperativity. This leaves a gap in the systematic understanding of strategic communication in adversarial settings. To address this, we introduce SDA (Strategic Dialogue Assessment), a framework grounded in Gricean and game-theoretic pragmatics to assess strategic use of language. It adapts the ME Game jury function to make it empirically estimable for analyzing dialogue. Our approach incorporates two key adaptations: a commitment-based taxonomy of discourse moves, which provides a finer-grained account of strategic effects, and the use of estimable proxies grounded in Gricean maxims to operationalize abstract constructs such as credibility. Together, these adaptations build on discourse theory by treating discourse as the strategic management of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Conflict Management and Negotiation · Topic Modeling
