Maksym Taranukhin


2024

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Stance Reasoner: Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media with Explicit Reasoning
Maksym Taranukhin | Vered Shwartz | Evangelos Milios
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

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.