Performing Stance Detection on Twitter Data using Computational Linguistics Techniques

Abstract: As humans, we can often detect from a persons utterances if he or she is in favor of or against a given target entity (topic, product, another person, etc). But from the perspective of a computer, we need means to automatically deduce the stance of the tweeter, given just the tweet text. In this paper, we present our results of performing stance detection on twitter data using a supervised approach. We begin by extracting bag-of-words to perform classification using TIMBL, then try and optimize the features to improve stance detection accuracy, followed by extending the dataset with two sets of lexicons - arguing, and MPQA subjectivity; next we explore the MALT parser and construct features using its dependency triples, finally we perform analysis using Scikit-learn Random Forest implementation.