Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge

Ang Li, Bin Liang, Jingqian Zhao, Bowen Zhang, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu


Abstract
Identifying users’ stances regarding specific targets/topics is a significant route to learning public opinion from social media platforms. Most existing studies of stance detection strive to learn stance information about specific targets from the context, in order to determine the user’s stance on the target. However, in real-world scenarios, we usually have a certain understanding of a target when we express our stance on it. In this paper, we investigate stance detection from a novel perspective, where the background knowledge of the targets is taken into account for better stance detection. To be specific, we categorize background knowledge into two categories: episodic knowledge and discourse knowledge, and propose a novel Knowledge-Augmented Stance Detection (KASD) framework. For episodic knowledge, we devise a heuristic retrieval algorithm based on the topic to retrieve the Wikipedia documents relevant to the sample. Further, we construct a prompt for ChatGPT to filter the Wikipedia documents to derive episodic knowledge. For discourse knowledge, we construct a prompt for ChatGPT to paraphrase the hashtags, references, etc., in the sample, thereby injecting discourse knowledge into the sample. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our KASD achieves state-of-the-art performance in in-target and zero-shot stance detection.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.972
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15703–15717
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.972
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.972
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ang Li, Bin Liang, Jingqian Zhao, Bowen Zhang, Min Yang, and Ruifeng Xu. 2023. Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15703–15717, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge (Li et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.972.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.972.mp4