Title
Exploiting stance hierarchies for cost-sensitive stance detection of Web documents
Abstract
Fact checking is an essential challenge when combating fake news. Identifying documents that agree or disagree with a particular statement (claim) is a core task in this process. In this context, stance detection aims at identifying the position (stance) of a document towards a claim. Most approaches address this task through classification models that do not consider the highly imbalanced class distribution. Therefore, they are particularly ineffective in detecting the minority classes (for instance, 'disagree'), even though such instances are crucial for tasks such as fact-checking by providing evidence for detecting false claims. In this paper, we exploit the hierarchical nature of stance classes which allows us to propose a modular pipeline of cascading binary classifiers, enabling performance tuning on a per step and class basis. We implement our approach through a combination of neural and traditional classification models that highlight the misclassification costs of minority classes. Evaluation results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our approach and its ability to significantly improve the classification performance of the important 'disagree' class.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10844-021-00642-z
JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Stance detection, Fact-checking, Cascading classifiers, Fake News
Journal
58
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0925-9902
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arjun Roy12049.74
Pavlos Fafalios215419.76
Asif Ekbal3737119.31
Xiaofei Zhu412.37
Stefan Dietze559768.07