Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Reuver, Myrthe, Verberne, Suzan, Fokkens, Antske
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Reuver, Myrthe
Verberne, Suzan
Fokkens, Antske
author_facet Reuver, Myrthe
Verberne, Suzan
Fokkens, Antske
contents For a viewpoint-diverse news recommender, identifying whether two news articles express the same viewpoint is essential. One way to determine "same or different" viewpoint is stance detection. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of operationalization choices for few-shot stance detection, with special attention to modelling stance across different topics. Our experiments test pre-registered hypotheses on stance detection. Specifically, we compare two stance task definitions (Pro/Con versus Same Side Stance), two LLM architectures (bi-encoding versus cross-encoding), and adding Natural Language Inference knowledge, with pre-trained RoBERTa models trained with shots of 100 examples from 7 different stance detection datasets. Some of our hypotheses and claims from earlier work can be confirmed, while others give more inconsistent results. The effect of the Same Side Stance definition on performance differs per dataset and is influenced by other modelling choices. We found no relationship between the number of training topics in the training shots and performance. In general, cross-encoding out-performs bi-encoding, and adding NLI training to our models gives considerable improvement, but these results are not consistent across all datasets. Our results indicate that it is essential to include multiple datasets and systematic modelling experiments when aiming to find robust modelling choices for the concept `stance'.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_03987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study
Reuver, Myrthe
Verberne, Suzan
Fokkens, Antske
Computation and Language
For a viewpoint-diverse news recommender, identifying whether two news articles express the same viewpoint is essential. One way to determine "same or different" viewpoint is stance detection. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of operationalization choices for few-shot stance detection, with special attention to modelling stance across different topics. Our experiments test pre-registered hypotheses on stance detection. Specifically, we compare two stance task definitions (Pro/Con versus Same Side Stance), two LLM architectures (bi-encoding versus cross-encoding), and adding Natural Language Inference knowledge, with pre-trained RoBERTa models trained with shots of 100 examples from 7 different stance detection datasets. Some of our hypotheses and claims from earlier work can be confirmed, while others give more inconsistent results. The effect of the Same Side Stance definition on performance differs per dataset and is influenced by other modelling choices. We found no relationship between the number of training topics in the training shots and performance. In general, cross-encoding out-performs bi-encoding, and adding NLI training to our models gives considerable improvement, but these results are not consistent across all datasets. Our results indicate that it is essential to include multiple datasets and systematic modelling experiments when aiming to find robust modelling choices for the concept `stance'.
title Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03987