TATA: Stance Detection via Topic-Agnostic and Topic-Aware Embeddings

Hans Hanley, Zakir Durumeric


Abstract
Stance detection is important for understanding different attitudes and beliefs on the Internet. However, given that a passage’s stance toward a given topic is often highly dependent on that topic, building a stance detection model that generalizes to unseen topics is difficult. In this work, we propose using contrastive learning as well as an unlabeled dataset of news articles that cover a variety of different topics to train topic-agnostic/TAG and topic-aware/TAW embeddings for use in downstream stance detection. Combining these embeddings in our full TATA model, we achieve state-of-the-art performance across several public stance detection datasets (0.771 F1-score on the Zero-shot VAST dataset). We release our code and data at https://github.com/hanshanley/tata.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.694
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11280–11294
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.694
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.694
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hans Hanley and Zakir Durumeric. 2023. TATA: Stance Detection via Topic-Agnostic and Topic-Aware Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11280–11294, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TATA: Stance Detection via Topic-Agnostic and Topic-Aware Embeddings (Hanley & Durumeric, EMNLP 2023)
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