Language Models Learn Metadata: Political Stance Detection Case Study

Abstract

Stance detection is a crucial NLP task with numerous applications in social science, from analyzing online discussions to assessing political campaigns. This paper investigates the optimal way to incorporate metadata into a political stance detection task. We demonstrate that previous methods combining metadata with language-based data for political stance detection have not fully utilized the metadata information; our simple baseline, using only party membership information, surpasses the current state-of-the-art. We then show that prepending metadata (e.g., party and policy) to political speeches performs best, outperforming all baselines, indicating that complex metadata inclusion systems may not learn the task optimally.