PAST-TIDE: Prototype-Anchored Statement Tuning with Topic-Invariant Normalization for Stance Detection

Md. Shakhoyat Rahman Shujon, MD Jahid Hasan Jim, Md. Milon Islam, Md Rezwanul Haque, Fakhri Karray


Abstract
We introduce PAST-TIDE, our stance detection system addressing both subtasks of the StanceNakba Shared Task at NakbaNLP@LREC-COLING 2026. The main idea is statement tuning. We redefine stance as cloze-style masked language modeling (MLM), letting a verbalizer map label words to stance categories through the pre-trained MLM head rather than appending a randomly initialized classification head. We complement this with prototypical contrastive learning, which uses learnable class prototypes for batch-size independent contrastive training, and topic-conditional layer normalization for cross-topic Arabic stance detection. PAST-TIDE achieves macro-F1 scores of 0.75 for Subtask A and 0.74 for Subtask B on the official leaderboard, indicating that minimal architectural additions to a pre-trained model can remain competitive in low-resource settings.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Amal Haddad, Serin Atiani, Shadi Abudalfa, Terry Regier, Paul Rayson, Khalil Sima’an, Camille Mansour
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
252–261
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-38
DOI:
10.63317/4an3eqwpdtpf
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md. Shakhoyat Rahman Shujon, MD Jahid Hasan Jim, Md. Milon Islam, Md Rezwanul Haque, and Fakhri Karray. 2026. PAST-TIDE: Prototype-Anchored Statement Tuning with Topic-Invariant Normalization for Stance Detection. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 252–261, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
PAST-TIDE: Prototype-Anchored Statement Tuning with Topic-Invariant Normalization for Stance Detection (Shujon et al., NakbaNLP 2026)
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