AraStance: A Multi-Country and Multi-Domain Dataset of Arabic Stance Detection for Fact Checking

With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that support multiple languages. One task of interest is claim veracity prediction, which can be addressed using stance detection with respect to relevant documents retrieved online. To this end, we present our new Arabic Stance Detection dataset (AraStance) of 910 claims from a diverse set of sources comprising three fact-checking websites and one news website. AraStance covers false and true claims from multiple domains (e.g., politics, sports, health) and several Arab countries, and it is wellbalanced between related and unrelated documents with respect to the claims. We benchmark AraStance, along with two other stance detection datasets, using a number of BERTbased models. Our best model achieves an accuracy of 85% and a macro F1 score of 78%, which leaves room for improvement and reflects the challenging nature of AraStance and the task of stance detection in general.