A few topical tweets are enough for effective user stance detection

Abstract

User stance detection entails ascertaining the position of a user towards a target, such as an entity, topic, or claim. Recent work that employs unsupervised classification has shown that performing stance detection on vocal Twitter users, who have many tweets on a target, can be highly accurate (+98%). However, such methods perform poorly or fail completely for less vocal users, who may have authored only a few tweets about a target. In this paper, we tackle stance detection for such users using two approaches. In the first approach, we improve user-level stance detection by representing tweets using contextualized embeddings, which capture latent meanings of words in context. We show that this approach outperforms two strong baselines and achieves 89.6% accuracy and 91.3% macro F-measure on eight controversial topics. In the second approach, we expand the tweets of a given user using their Twitter timeline tweets, which may not be topically relevant, and then we perform unsupervised classification of the user, which entails clustering a user with other users in the training set. This approach achieves 95.6% accuracy and 93.1% macro F-measure.