Automated stance detection and related machine learning methods can provide useful insights for media monitoring and academic research. Many of these approaches require annotated training datasets, which limits their applicability for languages where these may not be readily available. This paper explores the applicability of large language models for automated stance detection in a challenging scenario, involving a morphologically complex, lower-resource language, and a socio-culturally complex topic, immigration. If the approach works in this case, it can be expected to perform as well or better in less demanding scenarios. We annotate a large set of pro and anti-immigration examples, and compare the performance of multiple language models as supervised learners. We also probe the usability of ChatGPT as an instructable zero-shot classifier for the same task. Supervised achieves acceptable performance, and ChatGPT yields similar accuracy. This is promising as a potentially simpler and cheaper alternative for text classification tasks, including in lower-resource languages. We further use the best-performing model to investigate diachronic trends over seven years in two corpora of Estonian mainstream and right-wing populist news sources, demonstrating the applicability of the approach for news analytics and media monitoring settings, and discuss correspondences between stance changes and real-world events.

本文旨在研究大型语言模型在对于语言数据集难以获得的语言，如形态复杂、资源较少的语言中进行自动立场检测的适用性，同时探索了 ChatGPT 作为一种全零样本分类器的可行性，结果表明 ChatGPT 的性能可与有监督学习相当。最佳模型的应用还可用于研究爱沙尼亚主流新闻来源和右翼民粹主义新闻来源在七年间的历时趋势，并探讨立场变更与现实事件的对应关系，这为新闻分析和媒体监测提供了一个更为简单和省钱的文本分类任务的替代方案。

基于自动化技术的复杂主题和小语种中的立场检测：以极化新闻媒体中的移民问题为例