Previous studies have observed that public stances towards rumorous messages are crucial signals to detect trending rumors (Qazvinian et al., 2011;Zhao et al., 2015) and indicate the veracity of them (Mendoza et al., 2010;Procter et al., 2013;Liu et al., 2015;Jin et al., 2016;Glenski et al., 2018).
stance classification towards rumors is viewed as an important preceding step of rumor veracity prediction, especially in the context of Twitter conversations (Zubiaga et al., 2016a).