Debatable Intelligence: Benchmarking LLM Judges via Debate Speech
  Evaluation
Authors: name: Noy Sternlicht; name: Ariel Gera; name: Roy Bar-Haim; name: Tom Hope; name: Noam Slonim
Published: 2025-06-05 14:06:51

Abstract: We introduce Debate Speech Evaluation as a novel and challenging benchmark
for assessing LLM judges. Evaluating debate speeches requires a deep
understanding of the speech at multiple levels, including argument strength and
relevance, the coherence and organization of the speech, the appropriateness of
its style and tone, and so on. This task involves a unique set of cognitive
abilities that have previously received limited attention in systematic LLM
benchmarking. To explore such skills, we leverage a dataset of over 600
meticulously annotated debate speeches and present the first in-depth analysis
of how state-of-the-art LLMs compare to human judges on this task. Our findings
reveal a nuanced picture: while larger models can approximate individual human
judgments in some respects, they differ substantially in their overall judgment
behavior. We also investigate the ability of frontier LLMs to generate
persuasive, opinionated speeches, showing that models may perform at a human
level on this task.