Appeal, Align, Divide? Stance Detection for Group-Directed Messages in German Parliamentary Debates

Ines Rehbein, Maris Leander Buttmann, Julian Schlenker, Simone Paolo Ponzetto


Abstract
This paper presents a new benchmark for detecting group-based appeals, i.e., positive or negative references towards social groups, in German parliamentary debates. In the first step, group mentions are identified as targets for stance detection. In the next step, three human annotators assign stance labels to the group mentions, coding the speaker’s perspective towards the specific group. The created benchmark data is then used to investigate the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) for detecting polticians’ stances towards social groups. We explore the potential of different prompting strategies (zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, Chain-of-Thought) for this task and compare the results to a supervised BERT baseline, showing that in low-resource scenarios LLMs can outperform smaller fine-tuned models without the need for annotating large datasets.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
299–318
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.20/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Rehbein, Maris Leander Buttmann, Julian Schlenker, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2026. Appeal, Align, Divide? Stance Detection for Group-Directed Messages in German Parliamentary Debates. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:299–318.
Cite (Informal):
Appeal, Align, Divide? Stance Detection for Group-Directed Messages in German Parliamentary Debates (Rehbein et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.20.pdf