Stance Detection on Social Media: State of the Art and Trends

Stance detection on social media is an emerging opinion mining paradigm for various social and political applications where sentiment analysis might be sub-optimal. This paper surveys the work on stance detection and situates its usage within current opinion mining techniques in social media. An exhaustive review of stance detection techniques on social media is presented,including the task definition, the different types of targets in stance detection, the features set used, and the various machine learning approaches applied. The survey reports the state-of-the-art results on the existing benchmark datasets on stance detection, and discusses the most effective approaches. In addition, this study explores the emerging trends and the different applications of stance detection on social media. The study concludes by providing discussion of the gaps in the current existing research and highlighting the possible future directions for stance detection on social media.