Can Text Summarization Enhance the Headline Stance Detection Task? Benefits and Drawbacks

This paper presents an exploratory study that analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of summarization techniques for the headline stance detection. Different types of summarization approaches are tested, as well as two stance detection methods (machine learning vs deep learning) on two state-of-the-art datasets (Emergent and FNC-1). Journalists' headlines sourced from the Emergent dataset have demonstrated with very competitive results that they can be considered a summary of the news article. Based on this finding, this work evaluates the effectiveness of using summaries as a substitute for the full body text to determine the stance of a headline. As for automatic summarization methods, although there is still some room for improvement, several of the techniques analyzed show greater results compared to using the full body text-Lead Summarizer and PLM Summarizer are among the best-performing ones. In particular, PLM summarizer, especially when five sentences are selected as the summary length and deep learning is used, obtains the highest results compared to the other automatic summarization methods analyzed.