Evaluating the Role of Target Arguments in Rumour Stance Classification

Considering a conversation thread, stance classification aims to identify the opinion (e.g. agree or disagree) of replies towards a given target. The target of the stance is expected to be an essential component in this task, being one of the main factors that make it different from sentiment analysis. However, a recent study shows that a target-oblivious model outperforms target-aware models, suggesting that targets are not useful when predicting stance. This paper re-examines this phenomenon for rumour stance classification (RSC) on social media, where a target is a rumour story implied by the source tweet in the conversation. We propose adversarial attacks in the test data, aiming to assess the models robustness and evaluate the role of the data in the models performance. Results show that state-of-the-art models, including approaches that use the entire conversation thread, overly relying on superficial signals. Our hypothesis is that the naturally high occurrence of target-independent direct replies in RSC (e.g. "this is fake" or just "fake") results in the impressive performance of target-oblivious models, highlighting the risk of target instances being treated as noise during training.