The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of identifying speaker stance in discourse, provide an analytical resource for it and an evaluation of the level of agreement across speakers. We also explore to what extent language users agree about what kind of stances are expressed in natural language use or whether their interpretations diverge. In order to perform this task, a comprehensive cognitive-functional framework of ten stance categories was developed based on previous work on speaker stance in the literature. A corpus of opinionated texts was compiled, the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). An analytical protocol and interface (ALVA) for the annotations was set up and the data were independently annotated by two annotators. The annotation procedure, the annotation agreements and the co-occurrence of more than one stance in the utterances are described and discussed. The careful, analytical annotation process has returned satisfactory inter- and intra-annotation agreement scores, resulting in a gold standard corpus, the final version of the BBC. 

The analysis of various opinions and arguments in textual data can be facilitated by automatic topic modeling methods; however, the exploration and interpretation of the resulting topics and terms may prove to be difficult to the analysts. Opinions, stances, arguments, topics, terms, and text documents are usually connected with many-to-many relationships for such tasks. Exploratory visual analysis with interactive tools can help the analysts to get an overview of the topics and opinions, identify particularly interesting documents, and describe main themes of various arguments. In our previous work, we introduced an interactive tool called Topics2Themes that was used for topic and theme analysis of vaccination-related discussion texts with a limited set of stance categories. In this poster paper, we describe an application of Topics2Themes to a different genre of data, namely, political comments from Reddit, and multiple sentiment and stance categories detected with automatic classifiers.

While the task of manually extracting arguments from large collections of opinionated text is an intractable one, a tool for computerassisted extraction can (i) select a subset of the text collection that contains re-occurring arguments to minimise the amount of text that the human coder has to read, and (ii) present the selected texts in a way that facilitates manual coding of arguments. We propose a tool called Topics2Themes that uses topic modelling to extract important topics, as well as the terms and texts most closely associated with each topic. We also provide a graphical user interface for manual argument coding, in which the user can search for arguments in the texts selected, create a theme for each type of argument detected and connect it to the texts in which it is found. Topics, terms, texts and themes are displayed as elements in four separate lists, and associations between the elements are visualised through connecting links. It is also possible to focus on one particular element through the sorting functionality provided, which can be used to facilitate the argument coding and gain an overview and understanding of the arguments found in the texts.

The StaViCTA project is concerned with visualising the expression of stance in written text, and is therefore dependent on components for stance detection. These components are to (i) download and extract text from any HTML page and segment it into sentences, (ii) classify each sentence with respect to twelve different, notionally motivated, stance categories, and (iii) provide a RESTful HTTP API for communication with the visualisation components. The stance categories are certainty, uncertainty, contrast, recommendation, volition, prediction, agreement, disagreement, tact, rudeness, hypotheticality, and source of knowledge.