We Like, We Post: A Joint User-Post Approach for Facebook Post Stance Labeling

Web post and user stance labeling is challenging not only because of the informality and variation in language on the Web but also because of the lack of labeled data on fast-emerging new topics-even the labeled data we do have are usually heavily skewed. In this paper, we propose a joint user-post approach for stance labeling to mitigate the latter two difficulties. In labeling post stance, the proposed approach considers post content as well as posting and liking behavior, which involves users. Sentiment analysis is applied to posts to acquire their initial stance, and then the post and user stance are updated iteratively with correlated posting-related actions. The whole process works with limited labeled data, which solves the first problem. We use real interaction between authors and readers for stance labeling. Experimental results show that the proposed approach not only substantially improves content-based post stance labeling, but also yields better performance for the minor stance class, which solves the second problem.