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. 

Analysis of stance in textual data can reveal the attitudes of speakers, ranging from general agreement/disagreement with other speakers to fine-grained indications of wishes and emotions. The implementation of an automatic stance classifier and corresponding visualization techniques facilitates the analysis of human communication and social media texts. Furthermore, scholars in Digital Humanities could also benefit from such an approach by applying it for literature studies. For example, a researcher could explore the usage of such stance categories as certainty or prediction in a novel. Analysis of such abstract categories in longer texts would be complicated or even impossible with simpler tools such as regular expression search.

Our research on automatic and visual stance analysis is concerned with multiple theoretical and practical challenges in linguistics, computational linguistics, and information visualization. In this interactive demo, we demonstrate our web-based visual analytics system called ALVA, which is designed to support the text data annotation and stance classifier training stages. 

Online social media are a perfect text source for stance analysis. Stance in human communication is concerned with speaker attitudes, beliefs, feelings and opinions. Expressions of stance are associated with the speakers' view of what they are talking about and what is up for discussion and negotiation in the intersubjective exchange. Taking stance is thus crucial for the social construction of meaning. Increased knowledge of stance can be useful for many application fields such as business intelligence, security analytics, or social media monitoring. In order to process large amounts of text data for stance analyses, linguists need interactive tools to explore the textual sources as well as the processed data based on computational linguistics techniques. Both original texts and derived data are important for refining the analyses iteratively. In this work, we present a visual analytics tool for online social media text data that can be used to open up the investigation of stance phenomena. Our approach complements traditional linguistic analysis techniques and is based on the analysis of utterances associated with two stance categories: sentiment and certainty. Our contributions include (1) the description of a novel web-based solution for analyzing the use and patterns of stance meanings and expressions in human communication over time; and (2) specialized techniques used for visualizing analysis provenance and corpus overview/navigation. We demonstrate our approach by means of text media on a highly controversial scandal with regard to expressions of anger and provide an expert review from linguists who have been using our tool.

The automatic detection and classification of stance taking in text data using natural language processing and machine learning methods create an opportunity to gain insight about the writers’ feelings and attitudes towards their own and other people’s utterances. However, this task presents multiple challenges related to the training data collection as well as the actual classifier training. In order to facilitate the process of training a stance classifier, we propose a visual analytics approach called ALVA for text data annotation and visualization. Our approach supports the annotation process management and supplies annotators with a clean user interface for labeling utterances with several stance categories. The analysts are provided with a visualization of stance annotations which facilitates the analysis of categories used by the annotators. ALVA is already being used by our domain experts in linguistics and computational linguistics in order to improve the understanding of stance phenomena and to build a stance classifier for applications such as social media monitoring. 

Stance in human communication is a linguistic concept relating to expressions of subjectivity such as the speakers’ attitudes and emotions. Taking stance is crucial for the social construction of meaning and can be useful for many application fields such as business intelligence, security analytics, or social media monitoring. In order to process large amounts of text data for stance analyses, linguists need interactive tools to explore the textual sources as well as the results of computational linguistics techniques. Both aspects are important for refining the analyses iteratively. In this work, we present a visual analytics tool for online social media text data and corresponding time-series that can be used to investigate stance phenomena and to refine the so-called stance markers collection.