Improving Multi-task Stance Detection with Multi-task Interaction Network (2022)

Abstract: Stance detection aims to identify people’s standpoints expressed in the text towards a target, which can provide powerful information for various downstream tasks.Recent studies have proposed multi-task learning models that introduce sentiment information to boost stance detection.However, they neglect to explore capturing the fine-grained task-specific interaction between stance detection and sentiment tasks, thus degrading performance.To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel multi-task interaction network (MTIN) for improving the performance of stance detection and sentiment analysis tasks simultaneously.Specifically, we construct heterogeneous task-related graphs to automatically identify and adapt the roles that a word plays with respect to a specific task. Also, a multi-task interaction module is designed to capture the word-level interaction between tasks, so as to obtain richer task representations.Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both stance detection and sentiment analysis tasks.

## introduction stance detection is a task that identifies the standpoint or attitude (e.g. favor, against, or none, etc.) of user towards various targets (e.g. entity, event, opinion, people, etc.) @xcite . stance detection is crucial for machines to understand natural language and it has many practical application areas such as sarcasm detection @xcite , fake news detection @xcite , relation extraction @xcite , etc. some early studies attempt to extract the richer stance expressions by leveraging manually engineered features (darwish et al., 2020; kochkina et al., 2017; zarrella and marsh, 2016; * corresponding author stance pregnant people have feelings, and the ability to make decisions about their health tweet favor positive sentiment target favor negative legalization of abortion against positive favor positive legalization of abortion wearing a face mask wearing a face mask they have not the ability and shouldn't make decisions that involve their health i have an immune system that works fine, masks harm our immune system i have next to no immune system right now so thanks to all wearing masks ## methodology in this section, we describe our proposed mtin in detail. as demonstrated in figure . 2 , the architecture of the proposed mtin contains three main components: 1) input representation, which derives the sentence representation of the input sentencetarget pair with pre-trained language model, 2) multi-task interaction module, which constructs task-related graphs by using word-level pragmatics weights and captures the interaction between tasks, 3) task-related attention, which captures the richer stance and sentiment representations and outputs the final predicts. ## experiments in this section, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of mtin, with the goal of answering the following questions: rq1: how are the performances of the proposed mtin model compared to existing works? rq2: what are the contributions of components of mtin? ## conclusion in this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning model to improve the performance on both the stance detection and sentiment analysis task. we first construct heterogeneous task-related pragmatics graphs to capture more fine-grained task representation. besides, a multi-task interaction module is designed to capture the word-level interaction between tasks, so as to improve the overall performance of model. experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed model.