Chinese Competitive Debating Dataset and Benchmark

We introduce a dataset and benchmark for evaluating large language models' understanding of competitive Chinese-language debate at the match, stage, and speaker levels. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 21 September 2026. Debate adjudication requires tracking how arguments develop through interaction, yet existing datasets rarely combine fine-grained debate transcripts with professional judgments collected during real competitions under a shared rubric. We organized 182 matches and recruited 120 professional judges, with each match independently adjudicated by three judges using a predefined rubric. After excluding matches with incomplete records, the dataset contains 148 matches, 2,698 stages, and 20,542 exchange units, with manually verified transcripts and segmentation. It preserves original stage scores, match votes, best-debater ballots, and adjudication rationales. We define three tasks: winner-tendency prediction, stage-score prediction, and best-debater prediction. Zero-shot evaluation of multiple large language models yields a highest winner-prediction accuracy of 66.2%, a highest Pearson correlation of 0.250 between model stage scores and mean human ratings, and a highest best-debater prediction accuracy of 56.8%. The dataset and benchmark provide a testbed for studying large language models' understanding of interactive argumentation and their agreement with professional judges.

Why it counts

We introduce a dataset and benchmark for evaluating large language models' understanding of competitive Chinese-language debate at the match, stage, and speaker levels. The dataset and benchmark provide a testbed for studying large language models' understanding of interactive argumentation and their agreement with professional judges.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

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