A Semi-Supervised Approach to Detecting Stance in Tweets

Abstract

Stance classification aims to identify, for a particular issue under discussion, whether the speaker or author of a conversational turn has Pro (Favor) or Con (Against) stance on the issue. Detecting stance in tweets is a new task proposed for SemEval-2016 Task6, involving predicting stance for a dataset of tweets on the topics of abortion, atheism, climate change, feminism and Hillary Clinton. Given the small size of the dataset, our team created our own topic-specific training corpus by developing a set of high precision hashtags for each topic that were used to query the twitter API, with the aim of developing a large training corpus without additional human labeling of tweets for stance. The hashtags selected for each topic were predicted to be stance-bearing on their own. Experimental results demonstrate good performance for our features for opinion-target pairs based on generalizing dependency features using sentiment lexicons.Comment: @InProceedings{S16-1068, title = "NLDS-UCSC at SemEval-2016 Task 6: A Semi-Supervised Approach to Detecting Stance in Tweets", "Misra, Amita and Ecker, Brian and Handleman, Theodore and Hahn, Nicolas and Walker, Marilyn",booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016) ", year = "2016",publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics"