Automated Classification of Stance in Student Essays: An Approach Using Stance Target Information and the Wikipedia Link-Based Measure

We present a new approach to the automated classification of document-level argument stance, a relatively under-researched sub-task of Sentiment Analysis. In place of the noisy online debate data currently used in stance classification research, a corpus of student essays annotated for essay-level stance is constructed for use in a series of classification experiments. A novel set of features designed to capture the stance, stance targets, and topical relationships between the essay prompt and the student's essay is described. Models trained on this feature set showed significant increases in accuracy relative to two high baselines.

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