arXiv Computation and Language

MoPrO-SD: Modular Prompt Optimization for Stance Detection

MoPrO‑SD is a stance‑specific prompt optimization framework that breaks prompts into semantic modules and refines them sequentially with LLM feedback. It evaluates three refinement strategies—instruction‑only, instruction with reasoning, and instruction with per‑example reasoning—using class‑conditioned errors to improve stance detection. The authors also release VaccineStance, a new human‑annotated benchmark for vaccine stance detection, and demonstrate that MoPrO‑SD outperforms human‑written base prompts across multiple datasets and open‑weight LLMs.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Embedding Models for Stance-Aware Argument Retrieval

The paper investigates how dense embedding models can be used for stance-aware argument retrieval, a task that requires both topic relevance and correct stance (support or attack) toward a claim. Experiments reveal that current models favor topical overlap and ignore stance, and that contrastive training to fix this bias leads to over-correction, where models focus too much on polarity keywords at the expense of topic relevance. To address this, the authors propose diagnostic word-ablation metrics and a data‑centric solution involving a balanced argument curriculum and LLM‑augmented stance‑inverted arguments, which helps powerful models learn deeper directional logic and improves stance‑aware retrieval performance.

By Angelo Sparacino, Francesca Toni, Adam Dejl
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

MMDS-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models on Dynamic Stance in Social Media Interactions

MMDS-Bench is a new diagnostic benchmark for multimodal dynamic stance classification in social media parent‑reply interactions. It contains 3,482 multimodal instances annotated with a seven‑label stance taxonomy, plus an 800‑instance subset that demands structured reasoning over parent and reply understanding and stance‑relation inference. The benchmark also tags each instance with five challenge factors—multimodal fusion, parent framing, non‑literal expression, interaction reasoning, and label‑boundary ambiguity—and evaluates 12 multimodal large language models using a reference‑grounded LLM‑judge protocol, revealing that current models still struggle with relational inference beyond separate parent and reply comprehension.

By Yuzhe Ding, Kang He, Li Zheng, Shengwu Zheng, Teng Shi, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Can Decision Models Understand Stance? Evaluating Jev Against General-Purpose LLMs

The paper evaluates Jev, a specialized decision model, on stance detection tasks using the VAST (English) and ZS-CSD (Chinese) datasets. Jev matches GPT‑5.6 and outperforms other general‑purpose LLMs on VAST, but lags behind stronger LLMs on ZS‑CSD, especially in distinguishing favor from against. The authors suggest that Jev’s limitations may stem from difficulties in understanding reply relationships and stance direction rather than conversation length.

By Xing Li, Jinzhong Ning, Yijia Zhang, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Extracting Arguments, Not Just Classifying Them: Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Generative Component Detection

arXiv:2609.24855v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Argumentative component detection (ACD) is a core subtask of Argument(ation) Mining (AM) and one of its most challenging aspects, as it requires join...

By Sofiane Elguendouze (UniCA, I3S, MARIANNE), Erwan Hain (UniCA, MARIANNE), Elena Cabrio (MARIANNE, UniCA), Serena Villata (CNRS, MARIANNE)