The stance detection task aims at detecting the stance of a tweet or a text for a target. These targets can be named entities or free-form sentences (claims). Though the task involves reasoning of the tweet with respect to a target, we find that it is possible to achieve high accuracy on several publicly available Twitter stance detection datasets without looking at the target sentence. Specifically, a simple tweet classification model achieved human-level performance on the WT–WT dataset and more than two-third accuracy on various other datasets. We investigate the existence of biases in such datasets to find the potential spurious correlations of sentiment-stance relations and lexical choice associated with the stance category. Furthermore, we propose a new large dataset free of such biases and demonstrate its aptness on the existing stance detection systems. Our empirical findings show much scope for research on the stance detection task and proposes several considerations for creating future stance detection datasets.

The recently released FEVER dataset provided benchmark results on a fact-checking task in which given a factual claim, the system must extract textual evidence (sets of sentences from Wikipedia pages) that support or refute the claim. In this paper, we present a completely task-agnostic pipelined system, AttentiveChecker, consisting of three homogeneous Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) networks, which are multi-layer hierarchical networks that represent the context at different levels of granularity. We are the first to apply to this task a bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. AttentiveChecker can be used to perform document retrieval, sentence selection, and claim verification. Experiments on the FEVER dataset indicate that AttentiveChecker is able to achieve the state-of-the-art results on the FEVER test set.