UTCNN: a Deep Learning Model of Stance Classificationon on Social Media Text

Abstract: Most neural network models for document classification on social media focus on text infor-mation to the neglect of other information on these platforms. In this paper, we classify post stance on social media channels and develop UTCNN, a neural network model that incorporates user tastes, topic tastes, and user comments on posts. UTCNN not only works on social media texts, but also analyzes texts in forums and message boards. Experiments performed on Chinese Facebook data and English online debate forum data show that UTCNN achieves a 0.755 macro-average f-score for supportive, neutral, and unsupportive stance classes on Facebook data, which is significantly better than models in which either user, topic, or comment information is withheld. This model design greatly mitigates the lack of data for the minor class without the use of oversampling. In addition, UTCNN yields a 0.842 accuracy on English online debate forum data, which also significantly outperforms results from previous work as well as other deep learning models, showing that UTCNN performs well regardless of language or platform.

 This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. License details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Deep neural networks have been widely used in text classification and have achieved promising results BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . Most focus on content information and use models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) BIBREF3 or recursive neural networks BIBREF4 . However, for user-generated posts on social media like Facebook or Twitter, there is more information that should not be ignored. On social media platforms, a user can act either as the author of a post or as a reader who expresses his or her comments about the post.
In this paper, we classify posts taking into account post authorship, likes, topics, and comments. In particular, users and their “likes” hold strong potential for text mining. For example, given a set of posts that are related to a specific topic, a user's likes and dislikes provide clues for stance labeling. From a user point of view, users with positive attitudes toward the issue leave positive comments on the posts with praise or even just the post's content; from a post point of view, positive posts attract users who hold positive stances. We also investigate the influence of topics: different topics are associated with different stance labeling tendencies and word usage. For example we discuss women's rights and unwanted babies on the topic of abortion, but we criticize medicine usage or crime when on the topic of marijuana BIBREF5 . Even for posts on a specific topic like nuclear power, a variety of arguments are raised: green energy, radiation, air pollution, and so on. As for comments, we treat them as additional text information. The arguments in the comments and the commenters (the users who leave the comments) provide hints on the post's content and further facilitate stance classification.
In this paper, we propose the user-topic-comment neural network (UTCNN), a deep learning model that utilizes user, topic, and comment information. We attempt to learn user and topic representations which encode user interactions and topic influences to further enhance text classification, and we also incorporate comment information. We evaluate this model on a post stance classification task on forum-style social media platforms. The contributions of this paper are as follows: 1. We propose UTCNN, a neural network for text in modern social media channels as well as legacy social media, forums, and message boards — anywhere that reveals users, their tastes, as well as their replies to posts. 2. When classifying social media post stances, we leverage users, including authors and likers. User embeddings can be generated even for users who have never posted anything. 3. We incorporate a topic model to automatically assign topics to each post in a single topic dataset. 4. We show that overall, the proposed method achieves the highest performance in all instances, and that all of the information extracted, whether users, topics, or comments, still has its contributions.
In this paper we aim to use text as well as other features to see how they complement each other in a deep learning model. In the stance classification domain, previous work has showed that text features are limited, suggesting that adding extra-linguistic constraints could improve performance BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 . For example, Hasan and Ng as well as Thomas et al. require that posts written by the same author have the same stance BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 . The addition of this constraint yields accuracy improvements of 1–7% for some models and datasets. Hasan and Ng later added user-interaction constraints and ideology constraints BIBREF7 : the former models the relationship among posts in a sequence of replies and the latter models inter-topic relationships, e.g., users who oppose abortion could be conservative and thus are likely to oppose gay rights.
For work focusing on online forum text, since posts are linked through user replies, sequential labeling methods have been used to model relationships between posts. For example, Hasan and Ng use hidden Markov models (HMMs) to model dependent relationships to the preceding post BIBREF9 ; Burfoot et al. use iterative classification to repeatedly generate new estimates based on the current state of knowledge BIBREF11 ; Sridhar et al. use probabilistic soft logic (PSL) to model reply links via collaborative filtering BIBREF12 . In the Facebook dataset we study, we use comments instead of reply links. However, as the ultimate goal in this paper is predicting not comment stance but post stance, we treat comments as extra information for use in predicting post stance.
In recent years neural network models have been applied to document sentiment classification BIBREF13 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF2 . Text features can be used in deep networks to capture text semantics or sentiment. For example, Dong et al. use an adaptive layer in a recursive neural network for target-dependent Twitter sentiment analysis, where targets are topics such as windows 7 or taylor swift BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 ; recursive neural tensor networks (RNTNs) utilize sentence parse trees to capture sentence-level sentiment for movie reviews BIBREF4 ; Le and Mikolov predict sentiment by using paragraph vectors to model each paragraph as a continuous representation BIBREF18 . They show that performance can thus be improved by more delicate text models.
Others have suggested using extra-linguistic features to improve the deep learning model. The user-word composition vector model (UWCVM) BIBREF19 is inspired by the possibility that the strength of sentiment words is user-specific; to capture this they add user embeddings in their model. In UPNN, a later extension, they further add a product-word composition as product embeddings, arguing that products can also show different tendencies of being rated or reviewed BIBREF20 . Their addition of user information yielded 2–10% improvements in accuracy as compared to the above-mentioned RNTN and paragraph vector methods. We also seek to inject user information into the neural network model. In comparison to the research of Tang et al. on sentiment classification for product reviews, the difference is two-fold. First, we take into account multiple users (one author and potentially many likers) for one post, whereas only one user (the reviewer) is involved in a review. Second, we add comment information to provide more features for post stance classification. None of these two factors have been considered previously in a deep learning model for text stance classification. Therefore, we propose UTCNN, which generates and utilizes user embeddings for all users — even for those who have not authored any posts — and incorporates comments to further improve performance.
In this section, we first describe CNN-based document composition, which captures user- and topic-dependent document-level semantic representation from word representations. Then we show how to add comment information to construct the user-topic-comment neural network (UTCNN).
As shown in Figure FIGREF4 , we use a general CNN BIBREF3 and two semantic transformations for document composition . We are given a document with an engaged user INLINEFORM0 , a topic INLINEFORM1 , and its composite INLINEFORM2 words, each word INLINEFORM3 of which is associated with a word embedding INLINEFORM4 where INLINEFORM5 is the vector dimension. For each word embedding INLINEFORM6 , we apply two dot operations as shown in Equation EQREF6 : DISPLAYFORM0 
where INLINEFORM0 models the user reading preference for certain semantics, and INLINEFORM1 models the topic semantics; INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 are the dimensions of transformed user and topic embeddings respectively. We use INLINEFORM4 to model semantically what each user prefers to read and/or write, and use INLINEFORM5 to model the semantics of each topic. The dot operation of INLINEFORM6 and INLINEFORM7 transforms the global representation INLINEFORM8 to a user-dependent representation. Likewise, the dot operation of INLINEFORM9 and INLINEFORM10 transforms INLINEFORM11 to a topic-dependent representation.
After the two dot operations on INLINEFORM0 , we have user-dependent and topic-dependent word vectors INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 , which are concatenated to form a user- and topic-dependent word vector INLINEFORM3 . Then the transformed word embeddings INLINEFORM4 are used as the CNN input. Here we apply three convolutional layers on the concatenated transformed word embeddings INLINEFORM5 : DISPLAYFORM0 
where INLINEFORM0 is the index of words; INLINEFORM1 is a non-linear activation function (we use INLINEFORM2 ); INLINEFORM5 is the convolutional filter with input length INLINEFORM6 and output length INLINEFORM7 , where INLINEFORM8 is the window size of the convolutional operation; and INLINEFORM9 and INLINEFORM10 are the output and bias of the convolution layer INLINEFORM11 , respectively. In our experiments, the three window sizes INLINEFORM12 in the three convolution layers are one, two, and three, encoding unigram, bigram, and trigram semantics accordingly.
After the convolutional layer, we add a maximum pooling layer among convolutional outputs to obtain the unigram, bigram, and trigram n-gram representations. This is succeeded by an average pooling layer for an element-wise average of the three maximized convolution outputs.
Figure FIGREF10 illustrates the UTCNN model. As more than one user may interact with a given post, we first add a maximum pooling layer after the user matrix embedding layer and user vector embedding layer to form a moderator matrix embedding INLINEFORM0 and a moderator vector embedding INLINEFORM1 for moderator INLINEFORM2 respectively, where INLINEFORM3 is used for the semantic transformation in the document composition process, as mentioned in the previous section. The term moderator here is to denote the pseudo user who provides the overall semantic/sentiment of all the engaged users for one document. The embedding INLINEFORM4 models the moderator stance preference, that is, the pattern of the revealed user stance: whether a user is willing to show his preference, whether a user likes to show impartiality with neutral statements and reasonable arguments, or just wants to show strong support for one stance. Ideally, the latent user stance is modeled by INLINEFORM5 for each user. Likewise, for topic information, a maximum pooling layer is added after the topic matrix embedding layer and topic vector embedding layer to form a joint topic matrix embedding INLINEFORM6 and a joint topic vector embedding INLINEFORM7 for topic INLINEFORM8 respectively, where INLINEFORM9 models the semantic transformation of topic INLINEFORM10 as in users and INLINEFORM11 models the topic stance tendency. The latent topic stance is also modeled by INLINEFORM12 for each topic.
As for comments, we view them as short documents with authors only but without likers nor their own comments. Therefore we apply document composition on comments although here users are commenters (users who comment). It is noticed that the word embeddings INLINEFORM0 for the same word in the posts and comments are the same, but after being transformed to INLINEFORM1 in the document composition process shown in Figure FIGREF4 , they might become different because of their different engaged users. The output comment representation together with the commenter vector embedding INLINEFORM2 and topic vector embedding INLINEFORM3 are concatenated and a maximum pooling layer is added to select the most important feature for comments. Instead of requiring that the comment stance agree with the post, UTCNN simply extracts the most important features of the comment contents; they could be helpful, whether they show obvious agreement or disagreement. Therefore when combining comment information here, the maximum pooling layer is more appropriate than other pooling or merging layers. Indeed, we believe this is one reason for UTCNN's performance gains.
Finally, the pooled comment representation, together with user vector embedding INLINEFORM0 , topic vector embedding INLINEFORM1 , and document representation are fed to a fully connected network, and softmax is applied to yield the final stance label prediction for the post.
We start with the experimental dataset and then describe the training process as well as the implementation of the baselines. We also implement several variations to reveal the effects of features: authors, likers, comment, and commenters. In the results section we compare our model with related work.
We tested the proposed UTCNN on two different datasets: FBFans and CreateDebate. FBFans is a privately-owned, single-topic, Chinese, unbalanced, social media dataset, and CreateDebate is a public, multiple-topic, English, balanced, forum dataset. Results using these two datasets show the applicability and superiority for different topics, languages, data distributions, and platforms.
The FBFans dataset contains data from anti-nuclear-power Chinese Facebook fan groups from September 2013 to August 2014, including posts and their author and liker IDs. There are a total of 2,496 authors, 505,137 likers, 33,686 commenters, and 505,412 unique users. Two annotators were asked to take into account only the post content to label the stance of the posts in the whole dataset as supportive, neutral, or unsupportive (hereafter denoted as Sup, Neu, and Uns). Sup/Uns posts were those in support of or against anti-reconstruction; Neu posts were those evincing a neutral standpoint on the topic, or were irrelevant. Raw agreement between annotators is 0.91, indicating high agreement. Specifically, Cohen’s Kappa for Neu and not Neu labeling is 0.58 (moderate), and for Sup or Uns labeling is 0.84 (almost perfect). Posts with inconsistent labels were filtered out, and the development and testing sets were randomly selected from what was left. Posts in the development and testing sets involved at least one user who appeared in the training set. The number of posts for each stance is shown on the left-hand side of Table TABREF12 . About twenty percent of the posts were labeled with a stance, and the number of supportive (Sup) posts was much larger than that of the unsupportive (Uns) ones: this is thus highly skewed data, which complicates stance classification. On average, 161.1 users were involved in one post. The maximum was 23,297 and the minimum was one (the author). For comments, on average there were 3 comments per post. The maximum was 1,092 and the minimum was zero.
To test whether the assumption of this paper – posts attract users who hold the same stance to like them – is reliable, we examine the likes from authors of different stances. Posts in FBFans dataset are used for this analysis. We calculate the like statistics of each distinct author from these 32,595 posts. As the numbers of authors in the Sup, Neu and Uns stances are largely imbalanced, these numbers are normalized by the number of users of each stance. Table TABREF13 shows the results. Posts with stances (i.e., not neutral) attract users of the same stance. Neutral posts also attract both supportive and neutral users, like what we observe in supportive posts, but just the neutral posts can attract even more neutral likers. These results do suggest that users prefer posts of the same stance, or at least posts of no obvious stance which might cause annoyance when reading, and hence support the user modeling in our approach.
The CreateDebate dataset was collected from an English online debate forum discussing four topics: abortion (ABO), gay rights (GAY), Obama (OBA), and marijuana (MAR). The posts are annotated as for (F) and against (A). Replies to posts in this dataset are also labeled with stance and hence use the same data format as posts. The labeling results are shown in the right-hand side of Table TABREF12 . We observe that the dataset is more balanced than the FBFans dataset. In addition, there are 977 unique users in the dataset. To compare with Hasan and Ng's work, we conducted five-fold cross-validation and present the annotation results as the average number of all folds BIBREF9 , BIBREF5 .
The FBFans dataset has more integrated functions than the CreateDebate dataset; thus our model can utilize all linguistic and extra-linguistic features. For the CreateDebate dataset, on the other hand, the like and comment features are not available (as there is a stance label for each reply, replies are evaluated as posts as other previous work) but we still implemented our model using the content, author, and topic information.
In the UTCNN training process, cross-entropy was used as the loss function and AdaGrad as the optimizer. For FBFans dataset, we learned the 50-dimensional word embeddings on the whole dataset using GloVe BIBREF21 to capture the word semantics; for CreateDebate dataset we used the publicly available English 50-dimensional word embeddings, pre-trained also using GloVe. These word embeddings were fixed in the training process. The learning rate was set to 0.03. All user and topic embeddings were randomly initialized in the range of [-0.1 0.1]. Matrix embeddings for users and topics were sized at 250 ( INLINEFORM0 ); vector embeddings for users and topics were set to length 10.
We applied the LDA topic model BIBREF22 on the FBFans dataset to determine the latent topics with which to build topic embeddings, as there is only one general known topic: nuclear power plants. We learned 100 latent topics and assigned the top three topics for each post. For the CreateDebate dataset, which itself constitutes four topics, the topic labels for posts were used directly without additionally applying LDA.
For the FBFans data we report class-based f-scores as well as the macro-average f-score ( INLINEFORM0 ) shown in equation EQREF19 . DISPLAYFORM0 
where INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 are the average precision and recall of the three class. We adopted the macro-average f-score as the evaluation metric for the overall performance because (1) the experimental dataset is severely imbalanced, which is common for contentious issues; and (2) for stance classification, content in minor-class posts is usually more important for further applications. For the CreateDebate dataset, accuracy was adopted as the evaluation metric to compare the results with related work BIBREF7 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF12 .
We pit our model against the following baselines: 1) SVM with unigram, bigram, and trigram features, which is a standard yet rather strong classifier for text features; 2) SVM with average word embedding, where a document is represented as a continuous representation by averaging the embeddings of the composite words; 3) SVM with average transformed word embeddings (the INLINEFORM0 in equation EQREF6 ), where a document is represented as a continuous representation by averaging the transformed embeddings of the composite words; 4) two mature deep learning models on text classification, CNN BIBREF3 and Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) BIBREF0 , where the hyperparameters are based on their work; 5) the above SVM and deep learning models with comment information; 6) UTCNN without user information, representing a pure-text CNN model where we use the same user matrix and user embeddings INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 for each user; 7) UTCNN without the LDA model, representing how UTCNN works with a single-topic dataset; 8) UTCNN without comments, in which the model predicts the stance label given only user and topic information. All these models were trained on the training set, and parameters as well as the SVM kernel selections (linear or RBF) were fine-tuned on the development set. Also, we adopt oversampling on SVMs, CNN and RCNN because the FBFans dataset is highly imbalanced.
In Table TABREF22 we show the results of UTCNN and the baselines on the FBFans dataset. Here Majority yields good performance on Neu since FBFans is highly biased to the neutral class. The SVM models perform well on Sup and Neu but perform poorly for Uns, showing that content information in itself is insufficient to predict stance labels, especially for the minor class. With the transformed word embedding feature, SVM can achieve comparable performance as SVM with n-gram feature. However, the much fewer feature dimension of the transformed word embedding makes SVM with word embeddings a more efficient choice for modeling the large scale social media dataset. For the CNN and RCNN models, they perform slightly better than most of the SVM models but still, the content information is insufficient to achieve a good performance on the Uns posts. As to adding comment information to these models, since the commenters do not always hold the same stance as the author, simply adding comments and post contents together merely adds noise to the model.
Among all UTCNN variations, we find that user information is most important, followed by topic and comment information. UTCNN without user information shows results similar to SVMs — it does well for Sup and Neu but detects no Uns. Its best f-scores on both Sup and Neu among all methods show that with enough training data, content-based models can perform well; at the same time, the lack of user information results in too few clues for minor-class posts to either predict their stance directly or link them to other users and posts for improved performance. The 17.5% improvement when adding user information suggests that user information is especially useful when the dataset is highly imbalanced. All models that consider user information predict the minority class successfully. UCTNN without topic information works well but achieves lower performance than the full UTCNN model. The 4.9% performance gain brought by LDA shows that although it is satisfactory for single topic datasets, adding that latent topics still benefits performance: even when we are discussing the same topic, we use different arguments and supporting evidence. Lastly, we get 4.8% improvement when adding comment information and it achieves comparable performance to UTCNN without topic information, which shows that comments also benefit performance. For platforms where user IDs are pixelated or otherwise hidden, adding comments to a text model still improves performance. In its integration of user, content, and comment information, the full UTCNN produces the highest f-scores on all Sup, Neu, and Uns stances among models that predict the Uns class, and the highest macro-average f-score overall. This shows its ability to balance a biased dataset and supports our claim that UTCNN successfully bridges content and user, topic, and comment information for stance classification on social media text. Another merit of UTCNN is that it does not require a balanced training data. This is supported by its outperforming other models though no oversampling technique is applied to the UTCNN related experiments as shown in this paper. Thus we can conclude that the user information provides strong clues and it is still rich even in the minority class.
We also investigate the semantic difference when a user acts as an author/liker or a commenter. We evaluated a variation in which all embeddings from the same user were forced to be identical (this is the UTCNN shared user embedding setting in Table TABREF22 ). This setting yielded only a 2.5% improvement over the model without comments, which is not statistically significant. However, when separating authors/likers and commenters embeddings (i.e., the UTCNN full model), we achieved much greater improvements (4.8%). We attribute this result to the tendency of users to use different wording for different roles (for instance author vs commenter). This is observed when the user, acting as an author, attempts to support her argument against nuclear power by using improvements in solar power; when acting as a commenter, though, she interacts with post contents by criticizing past politicians who supported nuclear power or by arguing that the proposed evacuation plan in case of a nuclear accident is ridiculous. Based on this finding, in the final UTCNN setting we train two user matrix embeddings for one user: one for the author/liker role and the other for the commenter role.
Table TABREF24 shows the results of UTCNN, baselines as we implemented on the FBFans datset and related work on the CreateDebate dataset. We do not adopt oversampling on these models because the CreateDebate dataset is almost balanced. In previous work, integer linear programming (ILP) or linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) were proposed to integrate text features, author, ideology, and user-interaction constraints, where text features are unigram, bigram, and POS-dependencies; the author constraint tends to require that posts from the same author for the same topic hold the same stance; the ideology constraint aims to capture inferences between topics for the same author; the user-interaction constraint models relationships among posts via user interactions such as replies BIBREF7 , BIBREF9 .
The SVM with n-gram or average word embedding feature performs just similar to the majority. However, with the transformed word embedding, it achieves superior results. It shows that the learned user and topic embeddings really capture the user and topic semantics. This finding is not so obvious in the FBFans dataset and it might be due to the unfavorable data skewness for SVM. As for CNN and RCNN, they perform slightly better than most SVMs as we found in Table TABREF22 for FBFans.
Compared to the ILP BIBREF7 and CRF BIBREF9 methods, the UTCNN user embeddings encode author and user-interaction constraints, where the ideology constraint is modeled by the topic embeddings and text features are modeled by the CNN. The significant improvement achieved by UTCNN suggests the latent representations are more effective than overt model constraints.
The PSL model BIBREF12 jointly labels both author and post stance using probabilistic soft logic (PSL) BIBREF23 by considering text features and reply links between authors and posts as in Hasan and Ng's work. Table TABREF24 reports the result of their best AD setting, which represents the full joint stance/disagreement collective model on posts and is hence more relevant to UTCNN. In contrast to their model, the UTCNN user embeddings represent relationships between authors, but UTCNN models do not utilize link information between posts. Though the PSL model has the advantage of being able to jointly label the stances of authors and posts, its performance on posts is lower than the that for the ILP or CRF models. UTCNN significantly outperforms these models on posts and has the potential to predict user stances through the generated user embeddings.
For the CreateDebate dataset, we also evaluated performance when not using topic embeddings or user embeddings; as replies in this dataset are viewed as posts, the setting without comment embeddings is not available. Table TABREF24 shows the same findings as Table TABREF22 : the 21% improvement in accuracy demonstrates that user information is the most vital. This finding also supports the results in the related work: user constraints are useful and can yield 11.2% improvement in accuracy BIBREF7 . Further considering topic information yields 3.4% improvement, suggesting that knowing the subject of debates provides useful information. In sum, Table TABREF22 together with Table TABREF24 show that UTCNN achieves promising performance regardless of topic, language, data distribution, and platform.
We have proposed UTCNN, a neural network model that incorporates user, topic, content and comment information for stance classification on social media texts. UTCNN learns user embeddings for all users with minimum active degree, i.e., one post or one like. Topic information obtained from the topic model or the pre-defined labels further improves the UTCNN model. In addition, comment information provides additional clues for stance classification. We have shown that UTCNN achieves promising and balanced results. In the future we plan to explore the effectiveness of the UTCNN user embeddings for author stance classification.
Research of this paper was partially supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under the contract MOST 104-2221-E-001-024-MY2.

Figure and table captions:
Figure 1: Document composition in a convolutional neural network with three convolutional filters and user- and topic-dependent semantic transformations. Respectively, xw is the word embedding of word w, x′w is the word embedding of word w after transformation, Uk and Tj are user and topic matrix embeddings for user k and topic j.
Figure 2: The UTCNN model. Assuming one post author, l likers and p topics, xdw is the word embedding of word w in the document; xcw is the word embedding of word w in the comments; Uk and uk are the moderator matrix and vector embedding for moderator k; Tj and tj are the topic matrix and vector embedding for topic j; Ri and ri are the commenter matrix and vector embedding for commenter i. For simplicity we do not explicitly plot the topic vector embedding part for comments, but it does include a maximum pooling layer as with documents.
Table 1: Annotation results of FBFans and CreateDebate dataset.
Table 2: Distribution of like behavior.
Table 3: Performance of post stance classification on the FBFans dataset. *UTCNN (full) results are statistically significant (p-value < 0.005) with respect to all other methods except for UTCNN shared user embedding.
Table 4: Accuracies of post stance classification on CreateDebate dataset. *UTCNN results were statistically significant (p-value < 0.001) with respect to other UTCNN settings.

Questions about this paper:
How many layers does the UTCNN model have?
What are the baselines?

Answers:
eight layers
SVM with unigram, bigram, trigram features, with average word embedding, with average transformed word embeddings, CNN and RCNN, SVM, CNN, RCNN with comment information