Stanceosaurus 2.0: Classifying Stance Towards Russian and Spanish
  Misinformation
Anton Lavrouk Ian Ligon Tarek Naous Jonathan Zheng Alan Ritter Wei Xu
The Stanceosaurus corpus (Zheng et al., 2022) was designed to provide
high-quality, annotated, 5-way stance data extracted from Twitter, suitable for
analyzing cross-cultural and cross-lingual misinformation. In the Stanceosaurus
2.0 iteration, we extend this framework to encompass Russian and Spanish. The
former is of current significance due to prevalent misinformation amid
escalating tensions with the West and the violent incursion into Ukraine. The
latter, meanwhile, represents an enormous community that has been largely
overlooked on major social media platforms. By incorporating an additional
3,874 Spanish and Russian tweets over 41 misinformation claims, our objective
is to support research focused on these issues. To demonstrate the value of
this data, we employed zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on multilingual BERT,
yielding results on par with the initial Stanceosaurus study with a macro F1
score of 43 for both languages. This underlines the viability of stance
classification as an effective tool for identifying multicultural
misinformation.