SSR: Utilizing Simplified Stance Reasoning Process for Robust Stance Detection

Jianhua Yuan, Yanyan Zhao, Yanyue Lu, Bing Qin


Abstract
Dataset bias in stance detection tasks allows models to achieve superior performance without using targets. Most existing debiasing methods are task-agnostic, which fail to utilize task knowledge to better discriminate between genuine and bias features. Motivated by how humans tackle stance detection tasks, we propose to incorporate the stance reasoning process as task knowledge to assist in learning genuine features and reducing reliance on bias features. The full stance reasoning process usually involves identifying the span of the mentioned target and corresponding opinion expressions, such fine-grained annotations are hard and expensive to obtain. To alleviate this, we simplify the stance reasoning process to relax the granularity of annotations from token-level to sentence-level, where labels for sub-tasks can be easily inferred from existing resources. We further implement those sub-tasks by maximizing mutual information between the texts and the opinioned targets. To evaluate whether stance detection models truly understand the task from various aspects, we collect and construct a series of new test sets. Our proposed model achieves better performance than previous task-agnostic debiasing methods on most of those new test sets while maintaining comparable performances to existing stance detection models.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.596
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6846–6858
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.596
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianhua Yuan, Yanyan Zhao, Yanyue Lu, and Bing Qin. 2022. SSR: Utilizing Simplified Stance Reasoning Process for Robust Stance Detection. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6846–6858, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SSR: Utilizing Simplified Stance Reasoning Process for Robust Stance Detection (Yuan et al., COLING 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.596.pdf