@inproceedings{xu-etal-2019-recognising,
    title = "Recognising Agreement and Disagreement between Stances with Reason Comparing Networks",
    author = "Xu, Chang  and
      Paris, Cecile  and
      Nepal, Surya  and
      Sparks, Ross",
    editor = "Korhonen, Anna  and
      Traum, David  and
      M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P19-1460/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1460",
    pages = "4665--4671",
    abstract = "We identify agreement and disagreement between utterances that express stances towards a topic of discussion. Existing methods focus mainly on conversational settings, where dialogic features are used for (dis)agreement inference. We extend this scope and seek to detect stance (dis)agreement in a broader setting, where independent stance-bearing utterances, which prevail in many stance corpora and real-world scenarios, are compared. To cope with such non-dialogic utterances, we find that the reasons uttered to back up a specific stance can help predict stance (dis)agreements. We propose a reason comparing network (RCN) to leverage reason information for stance comparison. Empirical results on a well-known stance corpus show that our method can discover useful reason information, enabling it to outperform several baselines in stance (dis)agreement detection."
}