Overview
- Field: cs.CL
- Authors: Yazhi Zhang, Fuqiang Niu, Bowen Zhang
- Published: 2026-07-16
- arXiv: 2607.15240
- Descriptive analysis reveals target-dependent differences in stance distributions and conversational depth.
- Nested replies account for 23.3% of all comments, highlighting the importance of hierarchical conversation structure.
- Combining multi-target coverage, hierarchical conversations, and reliable multi-level human annotations, TikStance supports research in multimodal stance detection, political communication, computational social science, and context-aware natural language processing.
Abstract
Political discourse has increasingly moved to short-video platforms, yet computational analysis of such content remains constrained by the scarcity of datasets that jointly preserve audiovisual information and hierarchical conversations. Here we present TikStance, a multimodal and context-aware dataset comprising 161 videos and 13,876 comments from TikTok, designed for stance detection in political discussions. The dataset covers three major political figures in the 2024 U.S. election cycle—Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—with content collected between September 2023 and January 2025.Each discussion unit links a host video and its metadata to a parent-linked comment tree, enabling stance analysis within both audiovisual and conversational context. Each item was independently labeled by three annotators using a three-class scheme (Favor, Against, None) for video-to-target and comment-to-target stance; items with disagreement were re-annotated, and the final Krippendorff's α reached 0.743, 0.723, and 0.722 for the Trump, Biden, and Harris subsets, respectively.