UWB at SemEval-2016 Task 6: Stance Detection

This paper describes our system participating in the SemEval 2016 task: Detecting stance in Tweets. The goal was to identify whether the author of a tweet is in favor of the given target or against. Our approach is based on a maximum entropy classifier, which uses surface-level, sentiment and domain-specific features. We participated in both the supervised and weakly supervised subtasks and received promising results for most of the targets.

[1]  Vincent Ng,et al.  Stance Classification of Ideological Debates: Data, Models, Features, and Constraints , 2013, IJCNLP.

[2]  Raymond H. Putra,et al.  Support or Oppose? Classifying Positions in Online Debates from Reply Activities and Opinion Expressions , 2010, COLING.

[3]  Matt Thomas,et al.  Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from Congressional floor-debate transcripts , 2006, EMNLP.

[4]  Josef Steinberger,et al.  Creating Sentiment Dictionaries via Triangulation , 2011, Decis. Support Syst..

[5]  Saif Mohammad,et al.  NRC-Canada: Building the State-of-the-Art in Sentiment Analysis of Tweets , 2013, *SEMEVAL.

[6]  Adam Faulkner,et al.  Automated Classification of Stance in Student Essays: An Approach Using Stance Target Information and the Wikipedia Link-Based Measure , 2014, FLAIRS.

[7]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Linguistic Models for Analyzing and Detecting Biased Language , 2013, ACL.

[8]  Marshall S. Smith,et al.  The general inquirer: A computer approach to content analysis. , 1967 .

[9]  Saif Mohammad,et al.  Sentiment Analysis of Short Informal Texts , 2014, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[10]  Jodi Schneider,et al.  Arguing from a Point of View , 2012, AT.

[11]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Cats Rule and Dogs Drool!: Classifying Stance in Online Debate , 2011, WASSA@ACL.

[12]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Stance Classification using Dialogic Properties of Persuasion , 2012, NAACL.

[13]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Collective Stance Classification of Posts in Online Debate Forums , 2014 .

[14]  Tudor Groza,et al.  A review of argumentation for the Social Semantic Web , 2013, Semantic Web.

[15]  Philip J. Stone,et al.  Extracting Information. (Book Reviews: The General Inquirer. A Computer Approach to Content Analysis) , 1967 .

[16]  Huan Liu,et al.  Identifying Users with Opposing Opinions in Twitter Debates , 2014, SBP.

[17]  Swapna Somasundaran,et al.  Recognizing Stances in Online Debates , 2009, ACL.

[18]  Robert C. Wolpert,et al.  A Review of the , 1985 .

[19]  Saif Mohammad,et al.  SemEval-2016 Task 6: Detecting Stance in Tweets , 2016, *SEMEVAL.

[20]  Steven Bird,et al.  NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit , 2002, ACL.