FarExStance: Explainable Stance Detection for Farsi

Majid Zarharan, Maryam Hashemi, Malika Behroozrazegh, Sauleh Eetemadi, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Jennifer Foster


Abstract
We introduce FarExStance, a new dataset for explainable stance detection in Farsi. Each instance in this dataset contains a claim, the stance of an article or social media post towards that claim, and an extractive explanation which provides evidence for the stance label. We compare the performance of a fine-tuned multilingual RoBERTa model to several large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and parameter-efficient fine-tuned settings on our new dataset. On stance detection, the most accurate models are the fine-tuned RoBERTa model, the LLM Aya-23-8B which has been fine-tuned using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Regarding the quality of the explanations, our automatic evaluation metrics indicate that few-shot GPT-4o generates the most coherent explanations, while our human evaluation reveals that the best Overall Explanation Score (OES) belongs to few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The fine-tuned Aya-32-8B model produced explanations most closely aligned with the reference explanations.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.676
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:
10125–10147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.676/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Majid Zarharan, Maryam Hashemi, Malika Behroozrazegh, Sauleh Eetemadi, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, and Jennifer Foster. 2025. FarExStance: Explainable Stance Detection for Farsi. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10125–10147, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FarExStance: Explainable Stance Detection for Farsi (Zarharan et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.676.pdf