ExPrompt: Augmenting Prompts Using Examples as Modern Baseline for Stance Classification

Detecting the veracity of a statement automatically is a challenge the world is grappling with due to the vast amount of data spread across the web. Verifying a given claim typically entails validating it within the framework of supporting evidence like a retrieved piece of text. Classifying the stance of the text with respect to the claim is called stance classification. Despite advancements in automated fact-checking, most systems still rely on a substantial quantity of labeled training data, which can be costly. In this work, we avoid the costly training or fine-tuning of models by reusing pre-trained large language models together with few-shot in-context learning. Since we do not train any model, our approach ExPrompt is lightweight, demands fewer resources than other stance classification methods and can serve as a modern baseline for future developments. At the same time, our evaluation shows that our approach is able to outperform former state-of-the-art stance classification approaches regarding accuracy by at least 2 percent. Our scripts and data used in this paper are available at https://github.com/dice-group/ExPrompt.