X-stance: A Multilingual Multi-Target Dataset for Stance Detection

We extract a large-scale stance detection dataset from comments written by candidates of elections in Switzerland. The dataset consists of German, French and Italian text, allowing for a cross-lingual evaluation of stance detection. It contains 67 000 comments on more than 150 political issues (targets). Unlike stance detection models that have specific target issues, we use the dataset to train a single model on all the issues. To make learning across targets possible, we prepend to each instance a natural question that represents the target (e.g. "Do you support X?"). Baseline results from multilingual BERT show that zero-shot cross-lingual and cross-target transfer of stance detection is moderately successful with this approach.Comment: SwissText + KONVENS 2020. Data and code are available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/xstanc

Stance detection on social media: State of the art and trends

Stance detection on social media is an emerging opinion mining paradigm for various social and political applications in which sentiment analysis may be sub-optimal. There has been a growing research interest for developing effective methods for stance detection methods varying among multiple communities including natural language processing, web science, and social computing. This paper surveys the work on stance detection within those communities and situates its usage within current opinion mining techniques in social media. It presents an exhaustive review of stance detection techniques on social media, including the task definition, different types of targets in stance detection, features set used, and various machine learning approaches applied. The survey reports state-of-the-art results on the existing benchmark datasets on stance detection, and discusses the most effective approaches. In addition, this study explores the emerging trends and different applications of stance detection on social media. The study concludes by discussing the gaps in the current existing research and highlights the possible future directions for stance detection on social media.Comment: We request withdrawal of this article sincerely. We will re-edit this paper. Please withdraw this article before we finish the new versio

Capturing stance dynamics in social media: open challenges and research directions

Social media platforms provide a goldmine for mining public opinion on issues of wide societal interest and impact. Opinion mining is a problem that can be operationalised by capturing and aggregating the stance of individual social media posts as supporting, opposing or being neutral towards the issue at hand. While most prior work in stance detection has investigated datasets that cover short periods of time, interest in investigating longitudinal datasets has recently increased. Evolving dynamics in linguistic and behavioural patterns observed in new data require adapting stance detection systems to deal with the changes. In this survey paper, we investigate the intersection between computational linguistics and the temporal evolution of human communication in digital media. We perform a critical review of emerging research considering dynamics, exploring different semantic and pragmatic factors that impact linguistic data in general, and stance in particular. We further discuss current directions in capturing stance dynamics in social media. We discuss the challenges encountered when dealing with stance dynamics, identify open challenges and discuss future directions in three key dimensions: utterance, context and influence

Improved Target-specific Stance Detection on Social Media Platforms by Delving into Conversation Threads

Target-specific stance detection on social media, which aims at classifying a textual data instance such as a post or a comment into a stance class of a target issue, has become an emerging opinion mining paradigm of importance. An example application would be to overcome vaccine hesitancy in combating the coronavirus pandemic. However, existing stance detection strategies rely merely on the individual instances which cannot always capture the expressed stance of a given target. In response, we address a new task called conversational stance detection which is to infer the stance towards a given target (e.g., COVID-19 vaccination) when given a data instance and its corresponding conversation thread. To tackle the task, we first propose a benchmarking conversational stance detection (CSD) dataset with annotations of stances and the structures of conversation threads among the instances based on six major social media platforms in Hong Kong. To infer the desired stances from both data instances and conversation threads, we propose a model called Branch-BERT that incorporates contextual information in conversation threads. Extensive experiments on our CSD dataset show that our proposed model outperforms all the baseline models that do not make use of contextual information. Specifically, it improves the F1 score by 10.3% compared with the state-of-the-art method in the SemEval-2016 Task 6 competition. This shows the potential of incorporating rich contextual information on detecting target-specific stances on social media platforms and implies a more practical way to construct future stance detection tasks

Commonsense knowledge enhanced memory network for stance classification

Stance classification aims at identifying, in the text, the attitude toward the given targets as favorable, negative, or unrelated. In existing models for stance classification, only textual representation is leveraged, while commonsense knowledge is ignored. In order to better incorporate commonsense knowledge into stance classification, we propose a novel model named commonsense knowledge enhanced memory network, which jointly represents textual and commonsense knowledge representation of given target and text. The textual memory module in our model treats the textual representation as memory vectors, and uses attention mechanism to embody the important parts. For commonsense knowledge memory module, we jointly leverage the entity and relation embeddings learned by TransE model to take full advantage of constraints of the knowledge graph. Experimental results on the SemEval dataset show that the combination of the commonsense knowledge memory and textual memory can improve stance classification

Generative Entity-to-Entity Stance Detection with Knowledge Graph Augmentation

Stance detection is typically framed as predicting the sentiment in a given text towards a target entity. However, this setup overlooks the importance of the source entity, i.e., who is expressing the opinion. In this paper, we emphasize the need for studying interactions among entities when inferring stances. We first introduce a new task, entity-to-entity (E2E) stance detection, which primes models to identify entities in their canonical names and discern stances jointly. To support this study, we curate a new dataset with 10,619 annotations labeled at the sentence-level from news articles of different ideological leanings. We present a novel generative framework to allow the generation of canonical names for entities as well as stances among them. We further enhance the model with a graph encoder to summarize entity activities and external knowledge surrounding the entities. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong comparisons by large margins. Further analyses demonstrate the usefulness of E2E stance detection for understanding media quotation and stance landscape, as well as inferring entity ideology.Comment: EMNLP'22 Main Conferenc

Topic-Guided Sampling For Data-Efficient Multi-Domain Stance Detection

Stance Detection is concerned with identifying the attitudes expressed by an author towards a target of interest. This task spans a variety of domains ranging from social media opinion identification to detecting the stance for a legal claim. However, the framing of the task varies within these domains, in terms of the data collection protocol, the label dictionary and the number of available annotations. Furthermore, these stance annotations are significantly imbalanced on a per-topic and inter-topic basis. These make multi-domain stance detection a challenging task, requiring standardization and domain adaptation. To overcome this challenge, we propose $\textbf{T}$opic $\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{St}$anc$\textbf{E}$ $\textbf{D}$etection (TESTED), consisting of a topic-guided diversity sampling technique and a contrastive objective that is used for fine-tuning a stance classifier. We evaluate the method on an existing benchmark of $16$ datasets with in-domain, i.e. all topics seen and out-of-domain, i.e. unseen topics, experiments. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art with an average of $3.5$ F1 points increase in-domain, and is more generalizable with an averaged increase of $10.2$ F1 on out-of-domain evaluation while using $\leq10\%$ of the training data. We show that our sampling technique mitigates both inter- and per-topic class imbalances. Finally, our analysis demonstrates that the contrastive learning objective allows the model a more pronounced segmentation of samples with varying labels.Comment: ACL 2023 (Oral

Migration Reframed? A multilingual analysis on the stance shift in Europe during the Ukrainian crisis

The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe – at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from “migrant” to “refugee”, often even accentuated with phrases such as “real refugees”. However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift