We present a new dataset of online debates in English, annotated with stance. The dataset was scraped from the “Debating Europe” platform, where users exchange opinions over different subjects related to the European Union. The dataset is composed of 2600 comments pertaining to 18 debates related to the “European Green Deal”, in a conversational setting. After presenting the dataset and the annotated sub-part, we pre-train a model for a multilingual stance classification over the X-stance dataset before fine-tuning it over our dataset, and vice-versa. The fine-tuned models are shown to improve stance classification performance on each of the datasets, even though they have different languages, topics and targets. Subsequently, we propose to enhance the performances over “Debating Europe” with an interaction-aware model, taking advantage of the online debate structure of the platform. We also propose a semi-supervised self-training method to take advantage of the imbalanced and unlabeled data from the whole website, leading to a final improvement of accuracy by 3.4% over a Vanilla XLM-R model.

This paper presents an adaptive model of multimodal social behavior for embodied conversational agents. The context of this research is the training of youngsters for job interviews in a serious game where the agent plays the role of a virtual recruiter. With the proposed model the agent is able to adapt its social behavior according to the anxiety level of the trainee and a predefined difficulty level of the game. This information is used to select the objective of the system (to challenge or comfort the user), which is achieved by selecting the complexity of the next question posed and the agent’s verbal and non-verbal behavior. We have carried out a perceptive study that shows that the multimodal behavior of an agent implementing our model successfully conveys the expected social attitudes.