Corpus-Oriented Stance Target Extraction

Benjamin Steel, Derek Ruths


Abstract
Understanding public discourse through the frame of stance detection requires effective extraction of issues of discussion, or stance targets. Yet current approaches to stance target extraction are limited, only focusing on a single document to single stance target mapping. We propose a broader view of stance target extraction, which we call corpus-oriented stance target extraction. This approach considers that documents have multiple stance targets, those stance targets are hierarchical in nature, and document stance targets should not be considered in isolation of other documents in a corpus. We develop a formalization and metrics for this task, propose a new method to address this task, and show its improvement over previous methods using supervised and unsupervised metrics, and human evaluation tasks. Finally, we demonstrate its utility in a case study, showcasing its ability to aid in reliably surfacing key issues of discussion in large-scale corpuses.
Anthology ID:
2025.codi-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Michael Strube, Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Amir Zeldes, Chuyuan Li
Venues:
CODI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
209–227
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.codi-1.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Steel and Derek Ruths. 2025. Corpus-Oriented Stance Target Extraction. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025), pages 209–227, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Corpus-Oriented Stance Target Extraction (Steel & Ruths, CODI 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.codi-1.18.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2025.codi-1.18.SupplementaryMaterial.zip