A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit
Organizations: School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, China · School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University, Shenzhen, China
Abstract
Bioethical debates increasingly unfold on social media, yet stance detection research lacks large-scale, domain-specific resources for modeling such context-dependent discourse. We present BioStance, a context-aware dataset of 39,600 annotated Post-Comment pairs from Reddit bioethical discussions. BioStance covers six controversial targets across three dimensions of bioethical controversy: fundamental value conflicts, individual liberty versus collective responsibility, and technological uncertainty. Each instance preserves hierarchical conversational context and is labeled by three independent annotators using a three-class stance scheme: Favor, Against, and None. The annotations achieve a mean Krippendorff's of 0.82, indicating substantial reliability. By combining thematic diversity, conversational structure, and high-quality human annotation, BioStance supports research on context-aware stance detection, argument mining, and computational analysis of bioethical discourse.