Stance Detection — Favor, Against, or Neutral toward a Target

Stance detection is a natural-language-processing task that decides the position a text takes toward a specific claim, event, or topic — labelling it as favor, against, or neutral. Formalised by Mohammad et al. in the SemEval-2016 Task 6 shared task, it differs from plain sentiment analysis because the label is always relative to a defined target rather than the overall emotional tone of the text.