Examining Temporalities on Stance Detection towards COVID-19 Vaccination

Yida Mu, Mali Jin, Kalina Bontcheva, Xingyi Song

Abstract
Previous studies have highlighted the importance of vaccination as an effective strategy to control the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. It is crucial for policymakers to have a comprehensive understanding of the public’s stance towards vaccination on a large scale. However, attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination, such as pro-vaccine or vaccine hesitancy, have evolved over time on social media. Thus, it is necessary to account for possible temporal shifts when analysing these stances. This study aims to examine the impact of temporal concept drift on stance detection towards COVID-19 vaccination on Twitter. To this end, we evaluate a range of transformer-based models using chronological (splitting the training, validation, and test sets in order of time) and random splits (randomly splitting these three sets) of social media data. Our findings reveal significant discrepancies in model performance between random and chronological splits in several existing COVID-19-related datasets; specifically, chronological splits significantly reduce the accuracy of stance classification. Therefore, real-world stance detection approaches need to be further refined to incorporate temporal factors as a key consideration.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.594
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:
6732–6738
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.594
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yida Mu, Mali Jin, Kalina Bontcheva, and Xingyi Song. 2024. Examining Temporalities on Stance Detection towards COVID-19 Vaccination. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6732–6738, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Examining Temporalities on Stance Detection towards COVID-19 Vaccination (Mu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.594.pdf
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