Target-Adaptive Consistency Enhanced Prompt-Tuning for Multi-Domain Stance Detection

Abstract

Stance detection is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is challenging due to diverse expressions and topics related to the targets from multiple domains. Recently, prompt-tuning has been introduced to convert the original task into a cloze-style prediction task, achieving impressive results. Many prompt-tuning-based methods focus on one or two classic scenarios with concrete external knowledge enhancement. However, when facing intricate information in multi-domain stance detection, these methods cannot be adaptive to multi-domain semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel target-adaptive consistency enhanced prompt-tuning method (TCP) for stance detection with multiple domains. TCP incorporates target knowledge and prior knowledge to construct target-adaptive verbalizers for diverse domains and employs pilot experiments distillation to enhance the consistency between verbalizers and model training. Specifically, to capture the knowledge from multiple domains, TCP uses a target-adaptive candidate mining strategy to obtain the domain-related candidates. Then, TCP refines them with prior attributes to ensure prediction consistency. The Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) in prompt-tuning are with large-scale parameters, while only changing the verbalizer without corresponding tuning has a limited impact on the training process. Target-aware pilot experiments are conducted to enhance the consistency between the verbalizer and training by distilling the target-adaptive knowledge into prompt-tuning. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that TCP outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on nine stance detection datasets from multiple domains.