# Zero-Shot Stance Detection: A Dataset and Model using Generalized Topic Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03640/

## Key facts

- Cited by 98 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [Adapting Language Models for Zero-shot Learning by Meta-tuning on Dataset and Prompt Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04670/) (2021)
- [State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: A taxonomy and review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03050/) (2022)
- [Stance Detection with Collaborative Role-Infused LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10467/) (2023)
- [POLITICS: Pretraining with Same-story Article Comparison for Ideology Prediction and Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00619/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Prompt Engineering Methods in Large Language Models for Different NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12994/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Learning for Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06603/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Label-Adaptive Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07467/) (2021)
- [Investigating Chain-of-thought with ChatGPT for Stance Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03087/) (2023)
- [No Preference Left Behind: Group Distributional Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20299/) (2024)
- [NewsClaims: A New Benchmark for Claim Detection from News with Attribute Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08544/) (2021)
- [Infusing Knowledge from Wikipedia to Enhance Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03839/) (2022)
- [Classifying Argumentative Relations Using Logical Mechanisms and Argumentation Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07571/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14298/) (2024)
- [Prompting and Fine-Tuning Open-Sourced Large Language Models for Stance Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13734/) (2023)
- [A Challenge Dataset and Effective Models for Conversational Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11145/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Sentiment and Common Sense for Zero-shot Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08797/) (2022)
- [Improved Target-specific Stance Detection on Social Media Platforms by Delving into Conversation Threads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03061/) (2022)
- [Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15757/) (2023)
- [Automated stance detection in complex topics and small languages: the challenging case of immigration in polarizing news media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13047/) (2023)
- [Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10073/) (2024)
- [SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13022/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Conversational Stance Detection: Dataset and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17693/) (2025)
- [A Weakly Supervised Propagation Model for Rumor Verification and Stance Detection with Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02626/) (2022)
- [Cross-target Stance Detection by Exploiting Target Analytical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01761/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Address Open-Target Stance Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00222/) (2024)
- [STEM: Unsupervised STructural EMbedding for Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00712/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Learning for Cross-Target Stance Detection by Aggregating Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04535/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Subjective Language Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07959/) (2025)
- [Learning Stance Embeddings from Signed Social Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11675/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Stance Detection on Social Media: New Directions and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15690/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stance detection is an important component of understanding hidden influences in everyday life. Since there are thousands of potential topics to take a stance on, most with little to no training data, we focus on zero-shot stance detection: classifying stance from no training examples. In this paper, we present a new dataset for zero-shot stance detection that captures a wider range of topics and lexical variation than in previous datasets. Additionally, we propose a new model for stance detection that implicitly captures relationships between topics using generalized topic representations and show that this model improves performance on a number of challenging linguistic phenomena.