LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection

Yanxu Ji, Jinzhong Ning, Yijia Zhang, Zhi Liu, Hongfei Lin


Abstract
Stance detection aims to identify the attitude expressed in text towards a specific target. Recent studies on zero-shot and few-shot stance detection focus primarily on learning generalized representations from explicit targets. However, these methods often neglect implicit yet semantically important targets and fail to adaptively adjust the relative contributions of text and target in light of contextual dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel two-stage framework: First, a data augmentation framework named Hierarchical Collaborative Target Augmentation (HCTA) employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and annotate implicit targets via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and multi-LLM voting, significantly enriching training data with latent semantic relations. Second, we introduce DyMCA, a Dynamic Multi-level Context-aware Attention Network, integrating a joint text-target encoding and a content-aware mechanism to dynamically adjust text-target contributions based on context. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, confirming the effectiveness of implicit target augmentation and fine-grained contextual modeling.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.299
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
5883–5895
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.299/
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Cite (ACL):
Yanxu Ji, Jinzhong Ning, Yijia Zhang, Zhi Liu, and Hongfei Lin. 2025. LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5883–5895, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection (Ji et al., EMNLP 2025)
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