Intensity-Valued Emotions Help Stance Detection of Climate Change Twitter Data

verfasst von

Apoorva Upadhyaya, Marco Fisichella, Wolfgang Nejdl

Abstract

Our study focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, by identifying public attitudes on Twitter about climate change. Public consent and participation is the key factor in dealing with climate crises. However, discussions about climate change on Twitter are often influenced by the polarised beliefs that shape the discourse and divide it into communities of climate change deniers and believers. In our work, we propose a framework that helps identify different attitudes in tweets about climate change (deny, believe, ambiguous). Previous literature often lacks an efficient architecture or ignores the characteristics of climate-denier tweets. Moreover, the presence of various emotions with different levels of intensity turns out to be relevant for shaping discussions on climate change. Therefore, our paper utilizes emotion recognition and emotion intensity prediction as auxiliary tasks for our main task of stance detection. Our framework injects the words affecting the emotions embedded in the tweet to capture the overall representation of the attitude in terms of the emotions associated with it. The final task-specific and shared feature representations are fused with efficient embedding and attention techniques to detect the correct attitude of the tweet. Extensive experiments on our novel curated dataset, two publicly available climate change datasets (ClimateICWSM-2023 and ClimateStance-2022), and a benchmark dataset for stance detection (SemEval-2016) validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Organisationseinheit(en)

Forschungszentrum L3S

Typ

Aufsatz in Konferenzband

Seiten

6246-6254

Anzahl der Seiten

9

Publikationsdatum

2023

Publikationsstatus

Veröffentlicht

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Artificial intelligence

Ziele für nachhaltige Entwicklung

SDG 13 – Klimaschutzmaßnahmen

Elektronische Version(en)

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/693 (Zugang: Offen)