Predicting User Stances from Target-Agnostic Information using Large Language Models

We investigate Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to predict a user's stance on a target given a collection of his/her target-agnostic social media posts (i.e., user-level stance prediction). While we show early evidence that LLMs are capable of this task, we highlight considerable variability in the performance of the model across (i) the type of stance target, (ii) the prediction strategy and (iii) the number of target-agnostic posts supplied. Post-hoc analyses further hint at the usefulness of target-agnostic posts in providing relevant information to LLMs through the presence of both surface-level (e.g., target-relevant keywords) and user-level features (e.g., encoding users' moral values). Overall, our findings suggest that LLMs might offer a viable method for determining public stances towards new topics based on historical and target-agnostic data. At the same time, we also call for further research to better understand LLMs' strong performance on the stance prediction task and how their effectiveness varies across task contexts.

Enhancing Stance Classification with Quantified Moral Foundations

This study enhances stance detection on social media by incorporating deeper psychological attributes, specifically individuals' moral foundations. These theoretically-derived dimensions aim to provide a comprehensive profile of an individual's moral concerns which, in recent work, has been linked to behaviour in a range of domains, including society, politics, health, and the environment. In this paper, we investigate how moral foundation dimensions can contribute to predicting an individual's stance on a given target. Specifically we incorporate moral foundation features extracted from text, along with message semantic features, to classify stances at both message- and user-levels across a range of targets and models. Our preliminary results suggest that encoding moral foundations can enhance the performance of stance detection tasks and help illuminate the associations between specific moral foundations and online stances on target topics. The results highlight the importance of considering deeper psychological attributes in stance analysis and underscores the role of moral foundations in guiding online social behavior.

Dependently Typed Knowledge Graphs

Reasoning over knowledge graphs is traditionally built upon a hierarchy of languages in the Semantic Web Stack. Starting from the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for knowledge graphs, more advanced constructs have been introduced through various syntax extensions to add reasoning capabilities to knowledge graphs. In this paper, we show how standardized semantic web technologies (RDF and its query language SPARQL) can be reproduced in a unified manner with dependent type theory. In addition to providing the basic functionalities of knowledge graphs, dependent types add expressiveness in encoding both entities and queries, explainability in answers to queries through witnesses, and compositionality and automation in the construction of witnesses. Using the Coq proof assistant, we demonstrate how to build and query dependently typed knowledge graphs as a proof of concept for future works in this direction.