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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjectivity and Sentiment Polarity Inspired Two-Phase Approach

TL;DR: This paper addresses the problem of detecting the stance of given tweets, with respect to given topics, from user-generated text (tweets), using the SemEval 2016 stance detection task dataset and develops a two-phase feature-driven model.
Abstract: The problem of stance detection from Twitter tweets, has recently gained significant research attention. This paper addresses the problem of detecting the stance of given tweets, with respect to given topics, from user-generated text (tweets). We use the SemEval 2016 stance detection task dataset. The labels comprise of positive, negative and neutral stances, with respect to given topics. We develop a two-phase feature-driven model. First, the tweets are classified as neutral vs. non-neutral. Next, non-neutral tweets are classified as positive vs. negative. The first phase of our work draws inspiration from the subjectivity classification and the second phase from the sentiment classification literature. We propose the use of two novel features, which along with our streamlined approach, plays a key role deriving the strong results that we obtain. We use traditional support vector machine (SVM) based machine learning. Our system (F-score: 74.44 for SemEval 2016 Task A and 61.57 for Task B) significantly outperforms the state of the art (F-score: 68.98 for Task A and 56.28 for Task B). While the performance of the system on Task A shows the effectiveness of our model for targets on which the model was trained upon, the performance of the system on Task B shows the generalization that our model achieves. The stance detection problem in Twitter is applicable for user opinion mining related applications and other social influence and information flow modeling applications, in real life.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A survey of stance detection in social media posts and (online) regular texts is presented and it is hoped that this newly emerging topic will act as a significant resource for interested researchers and practitioners.
Abstract: Automatic elicitation of semantic information from natural language texts is an important research problem with many practical application areas. Especially after the recent proliferation of online content through channels such as social media sites, news portals, and forums; solutions to problems such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm/controversy/veracity/rumour/fake news detection, and argument mining gained increasing impact and significance, revealed with large volumes of related scientific publications. In this article, we tackle an important problem from the same family and present a survey of stance detection in social media posts and (online) regular texts. Although stance detection is defined in different ways in different application settings, the most common definition is “automatic classification of the stance of the producer of a piece of text, towards a target, into one of these three classes: {Favor, Against, Neither}.” Our survey includes definitions of related problems and concepts, classifications of the proposed approaches so far, descriptions of the relevant datasets and tools, and related outstanding issues. Stance detection is a recent natural language processing topic with diverse application areas, and our survey article on this newly emerging topic will act as a significant resource for interested researchers and practitioners.

131 citations


Cites background from "Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..."

  • ...These studies include [Addawood et al. 2017; Bar-Haim et al. 2017; Dey et al. 2017; Gadek et al. 2017; Grčar et al. 2017; HaCohen-kerner et al. 2017; Hercig et al. 2017; Küçük 2017a,b; Küçük and Can 2018; Kucher et al. 2017; Lai et al. 2018; Mohammad et al. 2017; Rohit and Singh 2018; Sen et al.…...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the dynamics of the opinions regarding COVID-19 vaccination by considering the one-month period following the first vaccine announcement, until the first vaccination took place in UK, in which the civil society has manifested a higher interest regarding the vaccination process.
Abstract: The coronavirus outbreak has brought unprecedented measures, which forced the authorities to make decisions related to the instauration of lockdowns in the areas most hit by the pandemic. Social media has been an important support for people while passing through this difficult period. On November 9, 2020, when the first vaccine with more than 90% effective rate has been announced, the social media has reacted and people worldwide have started to express their feelings related to the vaccination, which was no longer a hypothesis but closer, each day, to become a reality. The present paper aims to analyze the dynamics of the opinions regarding COVID-19 vaccination by considering the one-month period following the first vaccine announcement, until the first vaccination took place in UK, in which the civil society has manifested a higher interest regarding the vaccination process. Classical machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been compared to select the best performing classifier. 2 349 659 tweets have been collected, analyzed, and put in connection with the events reported by the media. Based on the analysis, it can be observed that most of the tweets have a neutral stance, while the number of in favor tweets overpasses the number of against tweets. As for the news, it has been observed that the occurrence of tweets follows the trend of the events. Even more, the proposed approach can be used for a longer monitoring campaign that can help the governments to create appropriate means of communication and to evaluate them in order to provide clear and adequate information to the general public, which could increase the public trust in a vaccination campaign.

101 citations

Book ChapterDOI
09 Sep 2019
TL;DR: This work explores the reproducibility of several existing stance detection models, including both neural models and classical classifier-based models, and performs a detailed comparative analysis of various methods and explores their shortcomings.
Abstract: Online forums and social media platforms are increasingly being used to discuss topics of varying polarities where different people take different stances. Several methodologies for automatic stance detection from text have been proposed in literature. To our knowledge, there has not been any systematic investigation towards their reproducibility, and their comparative performances. In this work, we explore the reproducibility of several existing stance detection models, including both neural models and classical classifier-based models. Through experiments on two datasets – (i) the popular SemEval microblog dataset, and (ii) a set of health-related online news articles – we also perform a detailed comparative analysis of various methods and explore their shortcomings.

58 citations


Cites methods from "Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..."

  • ...ysis: Table 5 and Table 6 describe the performances of all models on SemEval dataset and MPCHI dataset respectively. Since we could not reproduce the Frame Semantics feature of the two-step SVM model [5], we have reported both the performances of our implementation and that reported in the original paper [5] for the SemEval datasets (the original paper worked only on the SemEval datasets, not the MPC...

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Journal ArticleDOI
Rui Wang1, Deyu Zhou1, Mingmin Jiang1, Jiasheng Si1, Yang Yang1 
TL;DR: The general framework of opinion mining is introduced and the evaluation metrics are described, and the methodologies for stance detection on different sources, such as online forum and social media are discussed.
Abstract: With the prevalence of social media and online forum, opinion mining, aiming at analyzing and discovering the latent opinion in user-generated reviews on the Internet, has become a hot research topic. This survey focuses on two important subtasks in this field, stance detection and product aspect mining, both of which can be formalized as the problem of the triple (target, aspect, opinion) extraction. In this paper, we first introduce the general framework of opinion mining and describe the evaluation metrics. Then, the methodologies for stance detection on different sources, such as online forum and social media are discussed. After that, approaches for product aspect mining are categorized into three main groups which are corpus level aspect extraction, corpus level aspect, and opinion mining, and document level aspect and opinion mining based on the processing units and tasks. And then we discuss the challenges and possible solutions. Finally, we summarize the evolving trend of the reviewed methodologies and conclude the survey.

51 citations


Cites background or methods from "Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..."

  • ...Dey [49] employs so many elaborate features (such as sentiment lexicons, n-grams, POS tags) to capture the syntactic and semantic meaning of the tweets; ii) the small number of training data in this field limit the representation ability and the efficiency of the deep learning basedmodel....

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  • ...Although many deep learning based approaches [33], [41], [46], [48] obtain better results than the traditional feature based models [34]–[36], the traditional feature engineering based method [49] performs the best....

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  • ...Likewise, Dey [49] devises a two stage approach by using various features (e.g. MPQA subjectivity lexicon, WordNet Adjective) and obtains the best overall performance (Favg : 74.44%)....

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  • ...[49] K. Dey, R. Shrivastava, and S. Kaushik, ‘‘Twitter stance detection—...

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  • ...Likewise, Dey [49] devises a two stage approach by using various features (e....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2021
TL;DR: A novel BERT-based fine-tuning method is proposed that enhances the masked language model for stance detection by using a weighted log-odds-ratio to identify words with high stance distinguishability and then model an attention mechanism that focuses on these words.
Abstract: Detecting stance on Twitter is especially challenging because of the short length of each tweet, the continuous coinage of new terminology and hashtags, and the deviation of sentence structure from standard prose. Fine-tuned language models using large-scale in-domain data have been shown to be the new state-of-the-art for many NLP tasks, including stance detection. In this paper, we propose a novel BERT-based fine-tuning method that enhances the masked language model for stance detection. Instead of random token masking, we propose using a weighted log-odds-ratio to identify words with high stance distinguishability and then model an attention mechanism that focuses on these words. We show that our proposed approach outperforms the state of the art for stance detection on Twitter data about the 2020 US Presidential election.

40 citations


Cites methods from "Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..."

  • ...Another SVM-based model consisted of two-step SVMs (Dey et al., 2017)....

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References
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Proceedings Article
03 Dec 2012
TL;DR: The state-of-the-art performance of CNNs was achieved by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) as discussed by the authors, which consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax.
Abstract: We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0% which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.

73,978 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel, efficient, gradient based method called long short-term memory (LSTM) is introduced, which can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units.
Abstract: Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow. We briefly review Hochreiter's (1991) analysis of this problem, then address it by introducing a novel, efficient, gradient based method called long short-term memory (LSTM). Truncating the gradient where this does not do harm, LSTM can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units. Multiplicative gate units learn to open and close access to the constant error flow. LSTM is local in space and time; its computational complexity per time step and weight is O. 1. Our experiments with artificial data involve local, distributed, real-valued, and noisy pattern representations. In comparisons with real-time recurrent learning, back propagation through time, recurrent cascade correlation, Elman nets, and neural sequence chunking, LSTM leads to many more successful runs, and learns much faster. LSTM also solves complex, artificial long-time-lag tasks that have never been solved by previous recurrent network algorithms.

72,897 citations


"Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Different models, including deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) [16] [21], recurrent neural networks (RNN) [7] and long short-term memory (LSTM) [14] [15], traditional machine learning and genetic algorithms, were tried....

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  • ...as convolutional neural networks (CNN) [16] [21], recurrent neural networks (RNN) [7] and long short-term memory (LSTM) [14] [15], traditional machine learning and genetic algorithms, were tried....

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  • ...The second layer is composed of 128 Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units [15]....

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Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper proposed two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets, and the quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks.
Abstract: We propose two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task, and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks. We observe large improvements in accuracy at much lower computational cost, i.e. it takes less than a day to learn high quality word vectors from a 1.6 billion words data set. Furthermore, we show that these vectors provide state-of-the-art performance on our test set for measuring syntactic and semantic word similarities.

20,077 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper provides an introduction to the WEKA workbench, reviews the history of the project, and, in light of the recent 3.6 stable release, briefly discusses what has been added since the last stable version (Weka 3.4) released in 2003.
Abstract: More than twelve years have elapsed since the first public release of WEKA. In that time, the software has been rewritten entirely from scratch, evolved substantially and now accompanies a text on data mining [35]. These days, WEKA enjoys widespread acceptance in both academia and business, has an active community, and has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times since being placed on Source-Forge in April 2000. This paper provides an introduction to the WEKA workbench, reviews the history of the project, and, in light of the recent 3.6 stable release, briefly discusses what has been added since the last stable version (Weka 3.4) released in 2003.

19,603 citations


"Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...We perform preprocessing, followed by a two-phase SVM based machine learning using Weka [11] with a linear kernel and default parameters (cost function C = 1 and L2 regularizer), with 10% held-out data for the purpose of model development....

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  • ...Further note that, we use the Weka [11] tool to perform our machine learning activities....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: WordNet1 provides a more effective combination of traditional lexicographic information and modern computing, and is an online lexical database designed for use under program control.
Abstract: Because meaningful sentences are composed of meaningful words, any system that hopes to process natural languages as people do must have information about words and their meanings. This information is traditionally provided through dictionaries, and machine-readable dictionaries are now widely available. But dictionary entries evolved for the convenience of human readers, not for machines. WordNet1 provides a more effective combination of traditional lexicographic information and modern computing. WordNet is an online lexical database designed for use under program control. English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are organized into sets of synonyms, each representing a lexicalized concept. Semantic relations link the synonym sets [4].

15,068 citations


"Twitter Stance Detection — A Subjec..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...We extensively use Wordnet [26], to enable the construction of this syntactic feature, wherein, we aim to detect whether a token given in the tweet content, exists in Wordnet and is marked as an adjective there, and construct a boolean feature accordingly....

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  • ...Note that, words that at all can be used as an adjective (as per Wordnet), are used to form this feature, and not the actual usage of the word in text (which would be tagged by the PoS tagger)....

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  • ...• Wordnet Based Potential Adjective Recognition: Hatzivassiloglou and Wiebe [13] show that different kinds of adjectives, such as dynamic adjectives, semantically oriented adjectives, and gradable adjectives are strong predictors of presence of subjectivity....

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  • ...Feature Novelty: We used two features that are novel in the context of the task at hand: the Wordnet-based potential adjective recognition feature in the first phase and the frame semantics feature in the second phase....

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  • ...Note that, the two features that are novel in the context of the task at hand, namely Wordnet-based potential adjective recognition and the frame semantics feature, deliver strong impacts, as is clear from the improvement these deliver in the average F-score values....

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