How would Stance Detection Techniques Evolve after the Launch of ChatGPT?

TL;DR

This paper explores how the launch of ChatGPT impacts stance detection in NLP, demonstrating its competitive performance and explainability advantages over traditional models.

Contribution

It shows that ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art results in stance detection and introduces the potential for explainable AI in this domain.

Findings

ChatGPT achieves SOTA or similar performance on SemEval-2016 and P-Stance datasets.

ChatGPT can provide explanations for its predictions, enhancing interpretability.

ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize stance detection research and applications.

Abstract

Stance detection refers to the task of extracting the standpoint (Favor, Against or Neither) towards a target in given texts. Such research gains increasing attention with the proliferation of social media contents. The conventional framework of handling stance detection is converting it into text classification tasks. Deep learning models have already replaced rule-based models and traditional machine learning models in solving such problems. Current deep neural networks are facing two main challenges which are insufficient labeled data and information in social media posts and the unexplainable nature of deep learning models. A new pre-trained language model chatGPT was launched on Nov 30, 2022. For the stance detection tasks, our experiments show that ChatGPT can achieve SOTA or similar performance for commonly used datasets including SemEval-2016 and P-Stance. At the same time, ChatGPT can provide explanation for its own prediction, which is beyond the capability of any existing model. The explanations for the cases it cannot provide classification results are especially useful. ChatGPT has the potential to be the best AI model for stance detection tasks in NLP, or at least change the research paradigm of this field. ChatGPT also opens up the possibility of building explanatory AI for stance detection.