STANCE-C3: Domain-adaptive Cross-target Stance Detection via Contrastive Learning and Counterfactual Generation

Stance detection is the process of inferring a person's position or standpoint on a specific issue to deduce prevailing perceptions toward topics of general or controversial interest, such as health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing models for stance detection are trained to perform well for a single domain (e.g., COVID-19) and a specific target topic (e.g., masking protocols), but are generally ineffectual in other domains or targets due to distributional shifts in the data. However, constructing high-performing, domain-specific stance detection models requires an extensive corpus of labeled data relevant to the targeted domain, yet such datasets are not readily available. This poses a challenge as the process of annotating data is costly and time-consuming. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel stance detection model coined domain-adaptive Cross-target STANCE detection via Contrastive learning and Counterfactual generation (STANCE-C3) that uses counterfactual data augmentation to enhance domain-adaptive training by enriching the target domain dataset during the training process and requiring significantly less information from the new domain. We also propose a modified self-supervised contrastive learning as a component of STANCE-C3 to prevent overfitting for the existing domain and target and enable cross-target stance detection. Through experiments on various datasets, we show that STANCE-C3 shows performance improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods.