Identification of stance has recently gained a lot of attention with the extreme growth of fake news and filter bubbles. Over the last decade, many feature-based and deep-learning approaches have been proposed to solve stance detection. However, almost none of the existing works focus on providing a meaningful explanation for their prediction. In this work, we study stance detection with an emphasis on generating explanations for the predicted stance by capturing the pivotal argumentative structure embedded in a document. We propose to build a stance tree that utilizes rhetorical parsing to construct an evidence tree and to use Dempster Shafer Theory to aggregate the evidence. Human studies show that our unsupervised technique of generating stance explanations outperforms the SOTA extractive summarization method in terms of informativeness, non-redundancy, coverage, and overall quality. Furthermore, experiments show that our explanation-based stance prediction excels or matches the performance of the SOTA model on various benchmark datasets.

Clauses and sentences rarely stand on their own in an actual discourse; rather, the relationship between them carries important information that allows the discourse to express a meaning as a whole beyond the sum of its individual parts. Rhetorical analysis seeks to uncover this coherence structure. In this article, we present CODRA — a COmplete probabilistic Discriminative framework for performing Rhetorical Analysis in accordance with Rhetorical Structure Theory, which posits a tree representation of a discourse. CODRA comprises a discourse segmenter and a discourse parser. First, the discourse segmenter, which is based on a binary classifier, identifies the elementary discourse units in a given text. Then the discourse parser builds a discourse tree by applying an optimal parsing algorithm to probabilities inferred from two Conditional Random Fields: one for intra-sentential parsing and the other for multi-sentential parsing. We present two approaches to combine these two stages of parsing effectively. By conducting a series of empirical evaluations over two different data sets, we demonstrate that CODRA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, often by a wide margin. We also show that a reranking of the k-best parse hypotheses generated by CODRA can potentially improve the accuracy even further.