Improving Stance Detection with Multi-Dataset Learning and Knowledge Distillation

Yingjie Li, Chenye Zhao, Cornelia Caragea


Abstract
Stance detection determines whether the author of a text is in favor of, against or neutral to a specific target and provides valuable insights into important events such as legalization of abortion. Despite significant progress on this task, one of the remaining challenges is the scarcity of annotations. Besides, most previous works focused on a hard-label training in which meaningful similarities among categories are discarded during training. To address these challenges, first, we evaluate a multi-target and a multi-dataset training settings by training one model on each dataset and datasets of different domains, respectively. We show that models can learn more universal representations with respect to targets in these settings. Second, we investigate the knowledge distillation in stance detection and observe that transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model can be beneficial in our proposed training settings. Moreover, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AKD) method that applies instance-specific temperature scaling to the teacher and student predictions. Results show that the multi-dataset model performs best on all datasets and it can be further improved by the proposed AKD, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a large margin. We publicly release our code.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.511
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6332–6345
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.511
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.511
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yingjie Li, Chenye Zhao, and Cornelia Caragea. 2021. Improving Stance Detection with Multi-Dataset Learning and Knowledge Distillation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6332–6345, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Stance Detection with Multi-Dataset Learning and Knowledge Distillation (Li et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.511.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.511.mp4
Code
 chuchun8/mdl-stance-distillation