Weakly-Guided User Stance Prediction via Joint Modeling of Content and Social Interaction

Abstract

Social media websites have become a popular outlet for online users to express their opinions on controversial issues, such as gun control and abortion. Understanding users' stances and their arguments is a critical task for policy-making process and public deliberation. Existing methods rely on large amounts of human annotation for predicting stance on issues of interest, which is expensive and hard to scale to new problems. In this work, we present a weakly-guided user stance modeling framework which simultaneously considers two types of information: what do you say (via stance-based content generative model) and how do you behave (via social interaction-based graph regularization). We experiment with two types of social media data: news comments and discussion forum posts. Our model uniformly outperforms a logistic regression-based supervised method on stance-based link prediction for unseen users on news comments. Our method also achieves better or comparable stance prediction performance for discussion forum users, when compared with state-of-the-art supervised systems. Meanwhile, separate word distributions are learned for users of opposite stances. This potentially helps with better understanding and interpretation of conflicting arguments for controversial issues.