Distilling Calibrated Knowledge for Stance Detection

AbstractStance detection aims to determine the position of an author toward a target and provides insights into people’s views on controversial topics such as marijuana legalization. Despite recent progress in this task, most existing approaches use hard labels (one-hot vectors) during training, which ignores meaningful signals among categories offered by soft labels. In this work, we explore knowledge distillation for stance detection and present a comprehensive analysis. Our contributions are: 1) we propose to use knowledge distillation over multiple generations in which a student is taken as a new teacher to transfer knowledge to a new fresh student; 2) we propose a novel dynamic temperature scaling for knowledge distillation to calibrate teacher predictions in each generation step. Extensive results on three stance detection datasets show that knowledge distillation benefits stance detection and a teacher is able to transfer knowledge to a student more smoothly via calibrated guiding signals. We publicly release our code to facilitate future research.