Team_Zero at StanceEval2024: Frozen PLMs for Arabic Stance Detection

AbstractThis research explores the effectiveness of using pre-trained language models (PLMs) as feature extractors for Arabic stance detection on social media, focusing on topics like women empowerment, COVID-19 vaccination, and digital transformation. By leveraging sentence transformers to extract embeddings and incorporating aggregation architectures on top of BERT, we aim to achieve high performance without the computational expense of fine-tuning. Our approach demonstrates significant resource and time savings while maintaining competitive performance, scoring an F1-score of 78.62 on the test set. This study highlights the potential of PLMs in enhancing stance detection in Arabic social media analysis, offering a resource-efficient alternative to traditional fine-tuning methods.