A Few Topical Tweets are Enough for Effective User-Level Stance Detection
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 yield very high accuracy (+98 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 approach, we expand the tweets of a given user using their Twitter timeline tweets, 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
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