Stance Reasoner: Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media with Explicit Reasoning

Maksym Taranukhin, Vered Shwartz, Evangelos Milios

Abstract
Social media platforms are rich sources of opinionated content. Stance detection allows the automatic extraction of users’ opinions on various topics from such content. We focus on zero-shot stance detection, where the model’s success relies on (a) having knowledge about the target topic; and (b) learning general reasoning strategies that can be employed for new topics. We present Stance Reasoner, an approach to zero-shot stance detection on social media that leverages explicit reasoning over background knowledge to guide the model’s inference about the document’s stance on a target. Specifically, our method uses a pre-trained language model as a source of world knowledge, with the chain-of-thought in-context learning approach to generate intermediate reasoning steps. Stance Reasoner outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on 3 Twitter datasets, including fully supervised models. It can better generalize across targets, while at the same time providing explicit and interpretable explanations for its predictions.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1326
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
15257–15272
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1326
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maksym Taranukhin, Vered Shwartz, and Evangelos Milios. 2024. Stance Reasoner: Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media with Explicit Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15257–15272, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Stance Reasoner: Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media with Explicit Reasoning (Taranukhin et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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