A Few Topical Tweets are Enough for Effective User Stance Detection

Younes Samih, Kareem Darwish


Abstract
User stance detection entails ascertaining the position of a user towards a target, such as an entity, topic, or claim. Recent work that employs unsupervised classification has shown that performing stance detection on vocal Twitter users, who have many tweets on a target, can be highly accurate (+98%). However, such methods perform poorly or fail completely for less vocal users, who may have authored only a few tweets about a target. In this paper, we tackle stance detection for such users using two approaches. In the first approach, we improve user-level stance detection by representing tweets using contextualized embeddings, which capture latent meanings of words in context. We show that this approach outperforms two strong baselines and achieves 89.6% accuracy and 91.3% macro F-measure on eight controversial topics. In the second approach, we expand the tweets of a given user using their Twitter timeline tweets, which may not be topically relevant, and then we perform unsupervised classification of the user, which entails clustering a user with other users in the training set. This approach achieves 95.6% accuracy and 93.1% macro F-measure.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.227
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2637–2646
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.227
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.227
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Younes Samih and Kareem Darwish. 2021. A Few Topical Tweets are Enough for Effective User Stance Detection. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 2637–2646, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Few Topical Tweets are Enough for Effective User Stance Detection (Samih & Darwish, EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.eacl-main.227.pdf
Dataset:
 2021.eacl-main.227.Dataset.zip