AraStance: A Multi-Country and Multi-Domain Dataset of Arabic Stance Detection for Fact Checking

Tariq Alhindi, Amal Alabdulkarim, Ali Alshehri, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that support multiple languages. One task of interest is claim veracity prediction, which can be addressed using stance detection with respect to relevant documents retrieved online. To this end, we present our new Arabic Stance Detection dataset (AraStance) of 4,063 claim–article pairs from a diverse set of sources comprising three fact-checking websites and one news website. AraStance covers false and true claims from multiple domains (e.g., politics, sports, health) and several Arab countries, and it is well-balanced between related and unrelated documents with respect to the claims. We benchmark AraStance, along with two other stance detection datasets, using a number of BERT-based models. Our best model achieves an accuracy of 85% and a macro F1 score of 78%, which leaves room for improvement and reflects the challenging nature of AraStance and the task of stance detection in general.
Anthology ID:
2021.nlp4if-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
Venue:
NLP4IF
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57–65
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4if-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4if-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tariq Alhindi, Amal Alabdulkarim, Ali Alshehri, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and Preslav Nakov. 2021. AraStance: A Multi-Country and Multi-Domain Dataset of Arabic Stance Detection for Fact Checking. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, pages 57–65, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AraStance: A Multi-Country and Multi-Domain Dataset of Arabic Stance Detection for Fact Checking (Alhindi et al., NLP4IF 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2021.nlp4if-1.9.pdf
Code
 Tariq60/arastance