Binary classifier for parliamentary sentences: among sentences that are not Opposition, does the sentence express Support toward the European Union (label 1) or is it Neutral (label 0)?

This is the second stage of a two-step stance-detection cascade. It is applied only to sentences that the upstream Opposition detector has classified as Non-Opposition. Both stages use a 0.5 decision threshold.

Fine-tuned from jhu-clsp/mmBERT-base on hand-annotated parliamentary speeches from AUS, CZE, DEU, DNK, ESP, GBR, NLD, and SWE.

Labels

0 — Neutral
1 — Support

Training data

Source: hand-annotated parliamentary sentences labelled Neutral, Support, or Opposition.
For this model, restricted to gold non-Opposition rows (Neutral ∪ Support) and binarised as Support vs Neutral.
File: Stance_Retrain_undersampled.csv (undersampled to address class imbalance).
Split: leakage-safe StratifiedGroupKFold (n_splits=10) on country × speech_ID, so no speech appears in more than one fold. Realised allocation: 8 folds train / 1 fold val / 1 fold test (~80/10/10). Shares the same underlying stance split as the Opposition detector for consistent cascade evaluation.

Hyperparameters

Base model: jhu-clsp/mmBERT-base
Max sequence length: 320
Learning rate: 4e-05
Epochs: 4
Batch size: 32 (with gradient accumulation if large model)
Warmup ratio: 0.2
Weight decay: 0.05
LR scheduler: cosine
Optimizer: AdamW (HF Trainer default)
Mixed precision: fp16
Early stopping patience: 2 (monitoring f1_positive on val)
Class weights: balanced (sklearn compute_class_weight)
Focal loss: disabled (plain weighted cross-entropy)
Random seed: 123
Model selection: best checkpoint by validation f1_positive (minority-class F1)

Input format

Sentence-only input (no surrounding context window). Truncation to 320 tokens.

Usage (standalone — Support vs Neutral)

python

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("LBenoit/support-detector-mmbert")
mdl = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("LBenoit/support-detector-mmbert")

text = "European cooperation has brought decades of peace and prosperity."
enc  = tok(text, truncation=True, max_length=320, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.no_grad():
    prob_support = torch.softmax(mdl(**enc).logits, dim=-1)[0, 1].item()
print("P(Support | Non-Opposition) =", prob_support)

Usage (cascade — full 3-way stance)

python

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

OPP_REPO = "LBenoit/opposition-detector-mmbert"
SUP_REPO = "LBenoit/support-detector-mmbert"

tok_o = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(OPP_REPO)
mdl_o = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(OPP_REPO)
tok_s = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(SUP_REPO)
mdl_s = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(SUP_REPO)

def predict_stance(text, thresh=0.5):
    enc = tok_o(text, truncation=True, max_length=320, return_tensors="pt")
    p_opp = torch.softmax(mdl_o(**enc).logits, dim=-1)[0, 1].item()
    if p_opp >= thresh:
        return "Opposition"
    enc = tok_s(text, truncation=True, max_length=320, return_tensors="pt")
    p_sup = torch.softmax(mdl_s(**enc).logits, dim=-1)[0, 1].item()
    return "Support" if p_sup >= thresh else "Neutral"

Intended use

Research on parliamentary stance toward the EU. Designed as the second stage of an Opposition → Support cascade. Using it standalone on arbitrary text (without first filtering out Opposition sentences) is out of distribution and not recommended.

Limitations

Trained only on non-Opposition rows; applying it to Opposition sentences without the upstream filter will produce unreliable predictions.
Trained on parliamentary register; performance on social media, journalism, or other domains is not guaranteed.
Coverage limited to the eight countries listed above; generalisation to other parliaments is untested.
Sentence-level only; longer-range discourse context is not modelled.

LBenoit/support-mmBert-June2026

Support Detector