Abstract: We extract a large-scale stance detection dataset from comments written by candidates of elections in Switzerland. The dataset consists of German, French and Italian text, allowing for a cross-lingual evaluation of stance detection. It contains 67 000 comments on more than 150 political issues (targets). Unlike stance detection models that have specific target issues, we use the dataset to train a single model on all the issues. To make learning across targets possible, we prepend to each instance a natural question that represents the target (e.g."Do you support X?"). Baseline results from multilingual BERT show that zero-shot cross-lingual and cross-target transfer of stance detection is moderately successful with this approach.

Introduction: In recent years many datasets have been created for the task of automated stance detection, advancing natural language understanding systems for political science, opinion research and other application areas. Typically, such benchmarks BIBREF0 are composed of short pieces of text commenting on politicians or public issues and are manually annotated with their stance towards a target entity (e.g. Climate Change, or Trump). However, they are limited in scope on multiple levels BIBREF1. First of all, it is questionable how well current stance detection methods perform in a cross-lingual setting, as the multilingual datasets available today are relatively small, and specific to a single target BIBREF2, BIBREF3. Furthermore, specific models tend to be developed for each single target or pair of targets BIBREF4. Concerns have been raised that cross-target performance is often considerably lower than fully supervised performance BIBREF1. In this paper we propose a much larger dataset that combines multilinguality and a multitude of topics and targets. x-stance comprises more than 150 questions concerning Swiss politics and more than 67k answers given in the last decade by candidates running for political office in Switzerland. Questions are available in four languages: English, Swiss Standard German, French, and Italian. The language of a comment depends on the candidate's region of origin. We have extracted the data from the voting advice application Smartvote. On that platform, candidates respond to questions mainly in categorical form (yes / rather yes / rather no / no). They can also submit a free-text comment in order to justify, explain or differentiate their categorical answer. An example is given in Figure FIGREF1. We transform the dataset into a stance detection task by interpreting the question as a natural-language representation of the target, and the commentary as the input to be classified. The dataset is split into a multilingual training set and into multiple test sets to evaluate zero-shot cross-lingual and cross-target transfer. To provide a baseline, we fine-tune a multilingual Bert model BIBREF5 on x-stance. We show that the baseline accuracy is comparable to previous stance detection benchmarks while leaving ample room for improvement. In addition, multilingual Bert can generalize to a degree both cross-lingually and in a cross-target setting. We have made the dataset and the code for reproducing the baseline model publicly available.

Question: What is the performance of the baseline?
Answer: 75.1% and 75.6% accuracy