Researchers Release Large-Scale Dataset for Detecting Stance in Bioethical Debates on Social Media
Researchers have created BioStance, a dataset of 39,600 annotated Reddit post-comment pairs designed to improve stance detection in bioethical discussions. The dataset covers six controversial topics across three dimensions of bioethical debate and achieves high annotation reliability with a mean Krippendorff's alpha of 0.82. The resource addresses a gap in computational research on how people express positions in complex ethical debates on social media.
Computer scientists have introduced BioStance, a new dataset containing 39,600 annotated pairs of Reddit posts and comments focused on bioethical controversies. The dataset preserves the hierarchical conversational context of Reddit discussions and covers six controversial targets organized across three dimensions: fundamental value conflicts, individual liberty versus collective responsibility, and technological uncertainty. Each instance was independently labeled by three annotators using a three-class scheme (Favor, Against, None), achieving a mean Krippendorff's alpha of 0.82, which indicates substantial inter-annotator agreement. The researchers argue that while bioethical debates increasingly occur on social media platforms, existing stance detection research lacks large-scale, domain-specific resources for modeling such context-dependent discourse. BioStance is intended to support research on context-aware stance detection, argument mining, and computational analysis of bioethical discourse.
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- arXiv cs.CLCenter
A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit
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