Stance detection attending external knowledge from Wikipedia

This paper presents a novel approach to stance detection for unseen topics that takes advantage of external knowledge about the topics. We build a new stance detection dataset consisting of 6,701 tweets on seven topics with associated Wikipedia articles. An analysis of this dataset confirms the necessity of external knowledge for this task. This paper also presents a method of extracting related concepts and events from Wikipedia articles. To incorporate this extracted knowledge into stance detection, we propose a novel neural network model that can attend to such related concepts and events when encoding the given text using bi-directional long short-term memories. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, using knowledge extracted from Wikipedia, can improve stance detection performance.