# Can We Identify Stance Without Target Arguments? A Study for Rumour Stance Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10200/) (2020)
- [Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01042/) (2018)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Probing Neural Network Comprehension of Natural Language Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07355/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Stance Detection: A Dataset and Model using Generalized Topic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03640/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05972/) (2017)
- [RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06683/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Stance Detection for Mis- and Disinformation Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00242/) (2021)
- [Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07487/) (2015)
- [Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00388/) (2020)
- [Turing at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Sequential Approach to Rumour Stance Classification with Branch-LSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07221/) (2017)
- [BUT-FIT at SemEval-2019 Task 7: Determining the Rumour Stance with Pre-Trained Deep Bidirectional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10126/) (2019)
- [Measuring What Counts: The case of Rumour Stance Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04532/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SCRum-9: Multilingual Stance Classification over Rumours on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18916/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Considering a conversation thread, rumour stance classification aims to identify the opinion (e.g. agree or disagree) of replies towards a target (rumour story). Although the target is expected to be an essential component in traditional stance classification, we show that rumour stance classification datasets contain a considerable amount of real-world data whose stance could be naturally inferred directly from the replies, contributing to the strong performance of the supervised models without awareness of the target. We find that current target-aware models underperform in cases where the context of the target is crucial. Finally, we propose a simple yet effective framework to enhance reasoning with the targets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.