arXiv:2607. 22658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-speech dialogue models increasingly depend on prosody and interactional nuance to convey social intent, yet benchmarks for these cues remain limited.
By Yuzhe Wang (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Thomas Thebaud (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Jennifer Hu (Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Jes\'us Villalba-Lopez (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Venkatesh Ravichandran (Amazon AGI, USA), Georgi Tinchev (Amazon Research, UK), Najim Dehak (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), Laureano Moro-Vel\'azquez (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)
arXiv:2608.29066v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Stance detection is crucial for understanding the underlying attitude of an expression towards a target. Conversational stance detection is a more ch...
By Yifan Xiang, Bin Liang, Yuqi Huang, Ruifeng Xu, Kam-Fai Wong
StanceEval 2026 is the second edition of a shared task on stance detection in Arabic social media, where systems must classify a tweet’s stance toward a target as Favor, Against, or None. The event featured two tracks: Track 1 tests cross‑target transfer on thematically related topics (Women Driving vs. Women Empowerment), while Track 2 evaluates cross‑domain transfer to entirely unseen targets (E‑Cars and Trimester System). With 80 registered teams and 30 submissions, top systems achieved $F_{avg2}$ scores of 0.8994 (Track 1) and 0.9400 (Track 2), surpassing baseline performance and highlighting challenges such as target polarization and dialectal nuance.
By Rasha Albalawi, Nuha Albadi, Hamzah Luqman, Asma Yamani, Maram Kurdi, Saad Ezzini, Ahmed Ashraf, Maged Al-Shaibani, Nora Alturayeif
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.
By Meysam Sabbaghan, Nikesh Gyawali, Arman Zareian Jahromi, Sebastian Loera-Lozano, Doina Caragea, Cornelia Caragea
The paper introduces Mawqif-XT, a new Arabic benchmark dataset comprising 996 manually annotated tweets from three public targets: Women Driving, E-Cars, and Trimester System. Each tweet is labeled for stance, sentiment, and sarcasm following the Mawqif annotation scheme, and the dataset is intended as a held‑out evaluation set to test cross‑target generalization. Baseline results are provided using Arabic and multilingual transformer models as well as zero‑shot large language models, enabling reproducible evaluation alongside the original Mawqif dataset.
By Rasha Albalawi, Nuha Albadi, Hamzah Luqman, Maram Kurdi, Saad Ezzini, Asma Yamani, Ahmed Ashraf
The paper introduces a stance‑granularity selection policy for dialog systems that engage users with alternative viewpoints. By using Perspectivized Stance Vectors to break positions into concept‑level stances, the system selects the most novel viewpoint within a bandit‑controlled distance bound. Experiments with 63 participants show that concept‑level stance yields more varied exposure sequences and broader coverage of topic positions, though it does not affect depth of justification or reconstruction accuracy.
By Morita Tarvirdians, Reeve Lorena, Catharine Oertel