Stance Detection for Social Text: Inference-Enhanced Multi-Task Learning with Machine-Annotated Supervision

Abstract

Stance detection, a natural language processing technique, captures user attitudes on controversial social media topics. However, the semantic ambiguity of social texts makes accurate stance determination challenging. Existing annotated data is often domain-specific, resulting in poor model generalization for unseen targets and cross-domain scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we introduce inference tasks related to stance detection as auxiliary tasks and use a multitask learning approach to improve the model’s understanding of textual semantics. Meanwhile, to alleviate the scarcity of annotated data, we use argumentation corpus with abundant resources as the source domain to train the basic stance detection model. We integrate this model with a large-scale framework to facilitate weakly supervised learning for machine annotation of unlabeled social texts, thereby boosting the model’s adaptability across different targets and domains. Experimental results on four Twitter datasets demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the model’s stance discriminative ability and generalization performance.