LLM-based approaches have recently achieved impressive results in zero-shot stance detection. However, they still struggle in complex real-world scenarios, where stance understanding requires dynamic background knowledge, target definitions involve compound entities or events that must be explicitly linked to stance labels, and rhetorical devices such as irony often obscure the author's actual intent. To address these challenges, we propose MSME, a Multi-Stage, Multi-Expert framework for zero-shot stance detection. MSME consists of three stages: (1) Knowledge Preparation, where relevant background knowledge is retrieved and stance labels are clarified; (2) Expert Reasoning, involving three specialized modules-Knowledge Expert distills salient facts and reasons from a knowledge perspective, Label Expert refines stance labels and reasons accordingly, and Pragmatic Expert detects rhetorical cues such as irony to infer intent from a pragmatic angle; (3) Decision Aggregation, where a Meta-Judge integrates all expert analyses to produce the final stance prediction. Experiments on three public datasets show that MSME achieves state-of-the-art performance across the board.

Zero-Shot Stance Detection (ZSSD) identifies the attitude of the post toward unseen targets. Existing research using contrastive, meta-learning, or data augmentation suffers from generalizability issues or lack of coherence between text and target. Recent works leveraging large language models (LLMs) for ZSSD focus either on improving unseen target-specific knowledge or generating explanations for stance analysis. However, most of these works are limited by their over-reliance on explicit reasoning, provide coarse explanations that lack nuance, and do not explicitly model the reasoning process, making it difficult to interpret the model's predictions. To address these issues, in our study, we develop a novel interpretable ZSSD framework, IRIS. We provide an interpretable understanding of the attitude of the input towards the target implicitly based on sequences within the text (implicit rationales) and explicitly based on linguistic measures (explicit rationales). IRIS considers stance detection as an information retrieval ranking task, understanding the relevance of implicit rationales for different stances to guide the model towards correct predictions without requiring the ground-truth of rationales, thus providing inherent interpretability. In addition, explicit rationales based on communicative features help decode the emotional and cognitive dimensions of stance, offering an interpretable understanding of the author's attitude towards the given target. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets of VAST, EZ-STANCE, P-Stance, and RFD using 50%, 30%, and even 10% training data prove the generalizability of our model, benefiting from the proposed architecture and interpretable design.

As online news consumption grows, personalized recommendation systems have become integral to digital journalism. However, these systems risk reinforcing filter bubbles and political polarization by failing to incorporate diverse perspectives. Stance detection -- identifying a text's position on a target -- can help mitigate this by enabling viewpoint-aware recommendations and data-driven analyses of media bias. Yet, existing stance detection research remains largely limited to short texts and high-resource languages. To address these gaps, we introduce \textsc{K-News-Stance}, the first Korean dataset for article-level stance detection, comprising 2,000 news articles with article-level and 21,650 segment-level stance annotations across 47 societal issues. We also propose \textsc{JoA-ICL}, a \textbf{Jo}urnalism-guided \textbf{A}gentic \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext \textbf{L}earning framework that employs a language model agent to predict the stances of key structural segments (e.g., leads, quotations), which are then aggregated to infer the overall article stance. Experiments showed that \textsc{JoA-ICL} outperforms existing stance detection methods, highlighting the benefits of segment-level agency in capturing the overall position of long-form news articles. Two case studies further demonstrate its broader utility in promoting viewpoint diversity in news recommendations and uncovering patterns of media bias.

Stance detection identifies the viewpoint expressed in text toward a specific target, such as a political figure. While previous datasets have focused primarily on tweet-level stances from established platforms, user-level stance resources, especially on emerging platforms like Bluesky remain scarce. User-level stance detection provides a more holistic view by considering a user's complete posting history rather than isolated posts. We present the first stance detection dataset for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, collected from Bluesky and centered on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The dataset comprises 16,044 user-target stance pairs enriched with engagement metadata, interaction graphs, and user posting histories. PolitiSky24 was created using a carefully evaluated pipeline combining advanced information retrieval and large language models, which generates stance labels with supporting rationales and text spans for transparency. The labeling approach achieves 81\% accuracy with scalable LLMs. This resource addresses gaps in political stance analysis through its timeliness, open-data nature, and user-level perspective. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15616911

Stance detection seeks to identify the viewpoints of individuals either in favor or against a given target or a controversial topic. Current advanced neural models for stance detection typically employ fully parametric softmax classifiers. However, these methods suffer from several limitations, including lack of explainability, insensitivity to the latent data structure, and unimodality, which greatly restrict their performance and applications. To address these challenges, we present a novel collaborative stance detection framework called (CoSD) which leverages contrastive heterogeneous topic graph learning to learn topic-aware semantics and collaborative signals among texts, topics, and stance labels for enhancing stance detection. During training, we construct a heterogeneous graph to structurally organize texts and stances through implicit topics via employing latent Dirichlet allocation. We then perform contrastive graph learning to learn heterogeneous node representations, aggregating informative multi-hop collaborative signals via an elaborate Collaboration Propagation Aggregation (CPA) module. During inference, we introduce a hybrid similarity scoring module to enable the comprehensive incorporation of topic-aware semantics and collaborative signals for stance detection. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art detection performance of CoSD, verifying the effectiveness and explainability of our collaborative framework.

Learning multi-task models for jointly detecting stance and verifying rumors poses challenges due to the need for training data of stance at post level and rumor veracity at claim level, which are difficult to obtain. To address this issue, we leverage large language models (LLMs) as the foundation annotators for the joint stance detection (SD) and rumor verification (RV) tasks, dubbed as JSDRV. We introduce a novel reinforcement tuning framework to enhance the joint predictive capabilities of LLM-based SD and RV components. Specifically, we devise a policy for selecting LLM-annotated data at the two levels, employing a hybrid reward mechanism to choose high-quality labels for effective LLM fine-tuning on both tasks. Results demonstrate that JSDRV improves the capabilities of LLMs in the joint tasks, not only outperforming state-of-the-art methods but also generalizing to non-LLMs accommodated as task models.

Stance detection of social media text is a key component of downstream tasks involving the identification of groups of users with opposing opinions on contested topics such as vaccination and within arguments. In particular, stance provides an indication of an opinion towards an entity. This paper introduces DIVERSE, a dataset of over 173,000 YouTube video comments annotated for their stance towards videos of the U.S. military. The stance is annotated through a human-guided, machine-assisted labeling methodology that makes use of weak signals of tone within the sentence as supporting indicators, as opposed to using manual annotations by humans. These weak signals consist of the presence of hate speech and sarcasm, the presence of specific keywords, the sentiment of the text, and the stance inference from two Large Language Models. The weak signals are then consolidated using a data programming model before each comment is annotated with a final stance label. On average, the videos have 200 comments each, and the stance of the comments skews slightly towards the "against" characterization for both the U.S. Army and the videos posted on the channel.

Opinionated users often seek information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence due to confirmation bias. This conduct hinders their ability to consider alternative stances when searching the web. Despite this, few studies have analyzed how the diversification of search results on disputed topics influences the search behavior of highly opinionated users. To this end, we present a preregistered user study (n = 257) investigating whether different levels (low and high) of bias metrics and search results presentation (with or without AI-predicted stances labels) can affect the stance diversity consumption and search behavior of opinionated users on three debated topics (i.e., atheism, intellectual property rights, and school uniforms). Our results show that exposing participants to (counter-attitudinally) biased search results increases their consumption of attitude-opposing content, but we also found that bias was associated with a trend toward overall fewer interactions within the search page. We also found that 19% of users interacted with queries and search pages but did not select any search results. When we removed these participants in a post-hoc analysis, we found that stance labels increased the diversity of stances consumed by users, particularly when the search results were biased. Our findings highlight the need for future research to explore distinct search scenario settings to gain insight into opinionated users' behavior.

People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases, e.g., the confirmation bias. In this paper, we investigate whether stance labels and their explanations can help users consume more diverse search results. We automatically classify and label search results on three topics (i.e., intellectual property rights, school uniforms, and atheism) as against, neutral, and in favor, and generate explanations for these labels. In a user study (N =203), we then investigate whether search result stance bias (balanced vs biased) and the level of explanation (plain text, label only, label and explanation) influence the diversity of search results clicked. We find that stance labels and explanations lead to a more diverse search result consumption. However, we do not find evidence for systematic opinion change among users in this context. We believe these results can help designers of search engines to make more informed design decisions.

Stance detection determines whether the author of a piece of text is in favor of, against, or neutral towards a specified target, and can be used to gain valuable insights into social media. The ubiquitous indirect referral of targets makes this task challenging, as it requires computational solutions to model semantic features and infer the corresponding implications from a literal statement. Moreover, the limited amount of available training data leads to subpar performance in out-of-domain and cross-target scenarios, as data-driven approaches are prone to rely on superficial and domain-specific features. In this work, we decompose the stance detection task from a linguistic perspective, and investigate key components and inference paths in this task. The stance triangle is a generic linguistic framework previously proposed to describe the fundamental ways people express their stance. We further expand it by characterizing the relationship between explicit and implicit objects. We then use the framework to extend one single training corpus with additional annotation. Experimental results show that strategically-enriched data can significantly improve the performance on out-of-domain and cross-target evaluation.