  Recognizing fallacies is crucial for ensuring the quality and validity of
arguments across various domains. However, computational fallacy recognition
faces challenges due to the diverse genres, domains, and types of fallacies
found in datasets. This leads to a highly multiclass, and even multi-label,
setup with substantial class imbalance. In this study, we aim to enhance
existing models for fallacy recognition by incorporating additional context and
by leveraging large language models to generate synthetic data, thus increasing
the representation of the infrequent classes. We experiment with GPT3.5 to
generate synthetic examples and we examine the impact of prompt settings for
this. Moreover, we explore zero-shot and few-shot scenarios to evaluate the
effectiveness of using the generated examples for training smaller models
within a unified fallacy recognition framework. Furthermore, we analyze the
overlap between the synthetic data and existing fallacy datasets. Finally, we
investigate the usefulness of providing supplementary context for detecting
fallacy types that need such context, e.g., diversion fallacies. Our evaluation
results demonstrate consistent improvements across fallacy types, datasets, and
generators.
