Stance detection using diverse feature sets based on machine learning techniques

Sentiment analysis is the field that analyzes sentiments, and opinions of people about entities such as products, businesses, and events. As opinions influence the people's behaviors, it has numerous applications in real life such as marketing, politics, social media etc. Stance detection is the sub-field of sentiment analysis. The stance classification aims to automatically identify from the source text, whether the source is in favor, neutral, or opposed to the target. This research study proposed a framework to explore the performance of the conventional (NB, DT, SVM), ensemble learning (RF, AdaBoost) and deep learning-based (DBN, CNN-LSTM, and RNN) machine learning techniques. The proposed method is feature centric and extracted the (sentiment, content, tweet specific and part-of-speech) features from both datasets of SemEval2016 and SemEval2017. The proposed study has also explored the role of deep features such as GloVe and Word2Vec for stance classification which has not received attention yet for stance detection. Some base line features such as Bag of words, Ngram, TF-IDF are also extracted from both datasets to compare the proposed features along with deep features. The proposed features are ranked using feature ranking methods such as (information gain, gain ration and relief-f). Further, the results are evaluated using standard performance evaluation measures for stance classification with existing studies. The calculated results show that the proposed feature sets including sentiment, (part-of-speech, content, and tweet specific) are helpful for stance classification when applied with SVM and GloVe a deep feature has given the best results when applied with deep learning method RNN.