A Dataset for Detecting Stance in Tweets

We can often detect from a person’s utterances whether he/she is in favor of or against a given target entity (a product, topic, another person, etc.). Here for the first time we present a dataset of tweets annotated for whether the tweeter is in favor of or against pre-chosen targets of interest―their stance. The targets of interest may or may not be referred to in the tweets, and they may or may not be the target of opinion in the tweets. The data pertains to six targets of interest commonly known and debated in the United States. Apart from stance, the tweets are also annotated for whether the target of interest is the target of opinion in the tweet. The annotations were performed by crowdsourcing. Several techniques were employed to encourage high-quality annotations (for example, providing clear and simple instructions) and to identify and discard poor annotations (for example, using a small set of check questions annotated by the authors). This Stance Dataset, which was subsequently also annotated for sentiment, can be used to better understand the relationship between stance, sentiment, entity relationships, and textual inference.