Acquired TASTE: Multimodal Stance Detection with Textual and Structural Embeddings

Guy Barel, Oren Tsur, Dan Vilenchik


Abstract
Stance detection plays a pivotal role in enabling an extensive range of downstream applications, from discourse parsing to tracing the spread of fake news and the denial of scientific facts. While most stance classification models rely on the textual representation of the utterance in question, prior work has demonstrated the importance of the conversational context in stance detection. In this work, we introduce TASTE – a multimodal architecture for stance detection that harmoniously fuses Transformer-based content embedding with unsupervised structural embedding. Through the fine-tuning of a pre-trained transformer and the amalgamation with social embedding via a Gated Residual Network (GRN) layer, our model adeptly captures the complex interplay between content and conversational structure in determining stance. TASTE achieves state-of-the-art results on common benchmarks, significantly outperforming an array of strong baselines. Comparative evaluations underscore the benefits of social grounding – emphasizing the criticality of concurrently harnessing both content and structure for enhanced stance detection.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.433
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6492–6504
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.433/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guy Barel, Oren Tsur, and Dan Vilenchik. 2025. Acquired TASTE: Multimodal Stance Detection with Textual and Structural Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6492–6504, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Acquired TASTE: Multimodal Stance Detection with Textual and Structural Embeddings (Barel et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.433.pdf