Zero-shot Tweet-Level Stance Detection Enhanced by External Knowledge and Reflective Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract

Zero-shot tweet-level stance detection confronts two primary challenges: (1) mitigating the context sparsity inherent in short texts, and (2) establishing the relevance between implicit targets and textual content. While existing methods primarily focus on incorporating external knowledge, they neglect the intrinsic semantic cues embedded within key intra-textual entities. Furthermore, current models exhibit limited capability in determining the relevance of unseen targets to the given text, thereby struggling to differentiate between "neutral" and "irrelevant" stance labels. To address these issues, we first construct a four-class, multi-topic Japanese tweet dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first Japanese tweet-level dataset for stance detection. We then propose KIRP, a zero-shot stance detection framework. It integrates external knowledge with entity reorganization for data augmentation and employs prompt chaining for reasoning. Specifically, the framework incorporates knowledge graphs to supplement and reorganize key textual entities, while reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning extracts and validates implicit targets. To better distinguish "neutral" from "irrelevant" labels, we adopt stance-aware contrastive learning to capture discriminative features and design a three-layer iterative prototype network for fine-grained classification. Experimental results on SemEval-2016, WT-WT, and KIRP-D show that KIRP achieves state-of-the-art performance. KIRP obtains F1 scores of 84.05% (three-class) on SemEval-2016, and 84.99% and 79.18% (four-class) on WT-WT and KIRP-D, respectively.