Evaluating automatic annotation of lexicon-based models for stance detection of M-pox tweets from May 1st to Sep 5th, 2022.

Manually labeling data for supervised learning is time and energy consuming; therefore, lexicon-based models such as VADER and TextBlob are used to automatically label data. However, it is argued that automated labels do not have the accuracy required for training an efficient model. Although automated labeling is frequently used for stance detection, automated stance labels have not been properly evaluated, in the previous works. In this work, to assess the accuracy of VADER and TextBlob automated labels for stance analysis, we first manually label a Twitter, now X, dataset related to M-pox stance detection. We then fine-tune different transformer-based models on the hand-labeled M-pox dataset, and compare their accuracy before and after fine-tuning, with the accuracy of automated labeled data. Our results indicated that the fine-tuned models surpassed the accuracy of VADER and TextBlob automated labels by up to 38% and 72.5%, respectively. Topic modeling further shows that fine-tuning diminished the scope of misclassified tweets to specific sub-topics. We conclude that fine-tuning transformer models on hand-labeled data for stance detection, elevates the accuracy to a superior level that is significantly higher than automated stance detection labels. This study verifies that automated stance detection labels are not reliable for sensitive use-cases such as health-related purposes. Manually labeled data is more convenient for developing Natural Language Processing (NLP) models that study and analyze mass opinions and conversations on social media platforms, during crises such as pandemics and epidemics.