Improving Stance Detection by Leveraging Measurement Knowledge from Social Sciences: A Case Study of Dutch Political Tweets and Traditional Gender Role Division

Abstract: Stance detection (SD) concerns automatically determining the viewpoint (i.e., in favour of, against, or neutral) of a text's author towards a target. SD has been applied to many research topics, among which the detection of stances behind political tweets is an important one. In this paper, we apply SD to a dataset of tweets from official party accounts in the Netherlands between 2017 and 2021, with a focus on stances towards traditional gender role division, a dividing issue between (some) Dutch political parties. To implement and improve SD of traditional gender role division, we propose to leverage an established survey instrument from social sciences, which has been validated for the purpose of measuring attitudes towards traditional gender role division. Based on our experiments, we show that using such a validated survey instrument helps to improve SD performance.