A Survey on Stance Detection for Mis- and Disinformation Identification

Detecting attitudes expressed in texts, also known as stance detection, has become an important task for the detection of false information online, be it misinformation (unintentionally false) or disinformation (intentionally false, spread deliberately with malicious intent). Stance detection has been framed in different ways, including: (a) as a component of fact-checking, rumour detection, and detecting previously fact-checked claims; or (b) as a task in its own right. While there have been prior efforts to contrast stance detection with other related social media tasks such as argumentation mining and sentiment analysis, there is no survey examining the relationship between stance detection detection and mis- and disinformation detection from a holistic viewpoint, which is the focus of this survey. We review and analyse existing work in this area, before discussing lessons learnt and future challenges.