Can We Identify Stance without Target Arguments? A Study for Rumour Stance Classification

Yue Li, Carolina Scarton


Abstract
Considering a conversation thread, rumour stance classification aims to identify the opinion (e.g. agree or disagree) of replies towards a target (rumour story). Although the target is expected to be an essential component in traditional stance classification, we show that rumour stance classification datasets contain a considerable amount of real-world data whose stance could be naturally inferred directly from the replies, contributing to the strong performance of the supervised models without awareness of the target. We find that current target-aware models underperform in cases where the context of the target is crucial. Finally, we propose a simple yet effective framework to enhance reasoning with the targets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.253
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2844–2851
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.253
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Li and Carolina Scarton. 2024. Can We Identify Stance without Target Arguments? A Study for Rumour Stance Classification. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2844–2851, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Can We Identify Stance without Target Arguments? A Study for Rumour Stance Classification (Li & Scarton, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.253.pdf