Infusing external knowledge into user stance detection in social platforms

Abstract

Stance detection for user reviews on social platforms aims to classify the stance of users’ reviews toward a specific topic. Existing studies focused on the internal semantic features of reviews’ texts, but ignored the external knowledge associated with the review. This paper retrieves external knowledge related to the key information of each review by mapping it to a knowledge graph. Thereafter, this paper infuses the external knowledge into deep learning model for stance detection. Considering that infusing external knowledge may bring noise to the model, this paper adopts the personalized PageRank method to filter the introduced irrelevant external knowledge. Infusing external knowledge can improve the classification performance by providing background knowledge. In addition to considering the textual features of reviews when constructing the stance detection model, this paper employs a gated graph neural network (GGNN) approach to fuse the structural information between reviews to capture the interactions of reviews. The experiments show that the model improves 1.5% –6.9% in macro-average scores compared to six benchmark models in this paper. By combining the textual features and structural information of reviews and introducing external knowledge, the model effectively improves the stance detection performance.