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This paper presents our system submitted for Task 1 of the ArAIEval Shared Task on Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection in Arabic. Task 1 involves identifying all employed propaganda techniques in a given text from a set of possible techniques or detecting that no propaganda technique is present. Additionally, the task requires identifying the specific spans of text where these techniques occur. We explored the capabilities of a multilingual BERT model for this task, focusing on the effectiveness of using outputs from different hidden layers within the model. By fine-tuning the multilingual BERT, we aimed to improve the model&#39;s ability to recognize and locate various propaganda techniques. Our experiments showed that leveraging the hidden layers of the BERT model enhanced detection performance. Our system achieved competitive results, ranking second in the shared task, demonstrating that multilingual BERT models, combined with outputs from hidden layers, can effectively detect and identify spans of propaganda techniques in Arabic text.

ACL 2024

Mela at ArAIEval Shared Task: Propagandistic Techniques Detection in Arabic with a Multilingual Approach

arabic

propaganda

persuasion

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This paper presents our system submitted for Task 1 of the ArAIEval Shared Task on Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection in Arabic. Task 1 involves identifying all employed propaganda techniques in a given text from a set of possible techniques or detecting that no propaganda technique is present. Additionally, the task requires identifying the specific spans of text where these techniques occur. We explored the capabilities of a multilingual BERT model for this task, focusing on the effectiveness of using outputs from different hidden layers within the model. By fine-tuning the multilingual BERT, we aimed to improve the model's ability to recognize and locate various propaganda techniques. Our experiments showed that leveraging the hidden layers of the BERT model enhanced detection performance. Our system achieved competitive results, ranking second in the shared task, demonstrating that multilingual BERT models, combined with outputs from hidden layers, can effectively detect and identify spans of propaganda techniques in Arabic text.

workshop paper

This paper investigates the optimization of propaganda technique detection in Arabic text, including tweets & news paragraphs, from ArAIEval shared task 1. Our approach involves fine-tuning the AraBERT v2 model with a neural network classifier for sequence tagging. Experimental results show relying on the first token of the word for technique prediction produces the best performance. In addition, incorporating genre information as a feature further enhances the model's performance. Our system achieved a score of 25.41, placing us 4th on the leaderboard. Subsequent post-submission improvements further raised our score to 26.68.

Nullpointer at ArAIEval Shared Task: Arabic Propagandist Technique Detection with Token-to-Word Mapping in Sequence Tagging

This paper focuses on detecting propagandistic spans and persuasion techniques in Arabic text from tweets and news paragraphs. Each entry in the dataset contains a text sample and corresponding labels that indicate the start and end positions of propaganda techniques within the text. Tokens falling within a labeled span were assigned ’B’ (Begin) or ’I’ (Inside) tags, ’O’, corresponding to the specific propaganda technique. Using attention masks, we created uniform lengths for each span and assigned BIO tags to each token based on the provided labels. Then, we used AraBERT-base pre-trained model for Arabic text tokenization and embeddings with a token classification layer to identify propaganda techniques. Our training process involves a two-phase fine-tuning approach. First, we train only the classification layer for a few epochs, followed by full model fine-tuning, updating all parameters. This methodology allows the model to adapt to the specific characteristics of the propaganda detection task while leveraging the knowledge captured by the pretrained AraBERT model. Our approach achieved an F1 score of 0.2774, securing the 3rd position in the leaderboard of Task 1.

MemeMind at ArAIEval Shared Task: Spotting Persuasive Spans in Arabic Text with Persuasion Techniques Identification

We present the CLTL system designed for the ArAIEval Shared Task 2024 on multimodal propagandistic memes classification in Arabic. The challenge was divided into three subtasks: identifying propagandistic content from textual modality of memes (subtask 2A), from visual modality of memes (subtask 2B), and in a multimodal scenario when both modalities are combined (subtask 2C). We explored various unimodal transformer models for Arabic language processing (subtask 2A), visual models for image processing (subtask 2B), and concatenated text and image embeddings using the Multilayer Perceptron fusion module for multimodal propagandistic memes classification (subtask 2C). Our system achieved 77.96% for subtask 2A, 71.04% for subtask 2B, and 79.80% for subtask 2C, ranking 2nd, 1st, and 3rd on the leaderboard.

CLTL at ArAIEval Shared Task: Multimodal Propagandistic Memes Classification Using Transformer Models

In recent days, propaganda has started to influence public opinion increasingly as social media usage continues to grow. Our research has been part of the first challenge, Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection of ArAIEval shared task at the ArabicNLP 2024 conference, co-located with ACL 2024, identifying specific Arabic text spans using twenty-three propaganda techniques. We have augmented underrepresented techniques in the provided dataset using synonym replacement and have evaluated various machine learning (RF, SVM, MNB), deep learning (BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (bert-base-arabic, Marefa-NER, AraBERT) with transfer learning. Our comparative study has shown that the transformer model "bert-base-arabic'' has outperformed other models. Evaluating the test set, it has achieved the micro-F1 score of 0.2995 which is the highest. This result has secured our team "CUET_sstm'' first place among all participants in task 1 of the ArAIEval.

CUET_sstm at ArAIEval Shared Task: Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection Using Transformer-Based Model

The rise of memes as a tool for spreading propaganda presents a significant challenge in the current digital environment. In this paper, we outline our work for the ArAIEval Shared Task2 in ArabicNLP 2024. This study introduces a method for identifying propaganda in Arabic memes using a multimodal system that combines textual and visual indicators to enhance the result. Our approach achieves the first place in text classification with Macro-F1 of 78.69%, the third place in image classification with Macro-F1 of 65.92%, and the first place in multimodal classification with Macro-F1 of 80.51%

AlexUNLP-MZ at ArAIEval Shared Task: Contrastive Learning, LLM Features Extraction and Multi-Objective Optimization for Arabic Multi-Modal Meme Propaganda Detection

Detecting propagandistic spans and identifying persuasion techniques are crucial for promoting informed decision-making, safeguarding democratic processes, and fostering a media environment characterized by integrity and transparency. Various machine learning (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Multinomial Naive Bayes), deep learning (CNN, CNN+LSTM, CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based (AraBERTv2, AraBERT-NER, CamelBERT, BERT-Base-Arabic) models were exploited to perform the task. The evaluation results indicate that CamelBERT achieved the highest micro-F1 score (24.09%), outperforming CNN+LSTM and AraBERTv2. The study found that most models struggle to detect propagandistic spans when multiple spans are present within the same article. Overall, the model's performance secured a $6^{th}$ place ranking in the ArAIEval Shared Task-1.

SemanticCuetSync at ArAIEval Shared Task: Detecting Propagandistic Spans with Persuasion Techniques Identification using Pre-trained Transformers

In this paper, we are exploring mitigating class imbalance in Arabic propaganda detection. Given a multigenre text which could be a news paragraph or a tweet, the objective is to identify the propaganda technique employed in the text along with the exact span(s) where each technique occurs. We approach this task as a sequence tagging task. We utilise AraBERT for sequence classification and implement data augmentation and random truncation methods to mitigate the class imbalance within the dataset. We demonstrate the importance of considering macro-F1 as well as micro-F1 when evaluating classifier performance in this scenario.

SussexAI at ArAIEval Shared Task: Mitigating Class Imbalance in Arabic Propaganda Detection

We present an overview of the FIGNEWS shared task, organized as part of the Arabic- NLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. The shared task addresses bias and pro- paganda annotation in multilingual news posts. We focus on the early days of the Israel War on Gaza as a case study. The task aims to foster collaboration in developing annotation guide- lines for subjective tasks by creating frame- works for analyzing diverse narratives high- lighting potential bias and propaganda. In a spirit of fostering and encouraging diversity, we address the problem from a multilingual perspective, namely within five languages: En- glish, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi. A total of 17 teams participated in two annota- tion subtasks: bias (16 teams) and propaganda (6 teams). The teams competed in four evalua- tion tracks: guidelines development, annotation quality, annotation quantity, and consistency. Collectively, the teams produced 129,800 data points. Key findings and implications for the field are discussed.

The FIGNEWS Shared Task on News Media Narratives

This paper presents our team's contribution to the FIGNEWS 2024 Shared Task, which involved annotating bias and propaganda in news coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. We developed comprehensive guidelines and employed a rigorous methodology to analyze 2,200 news posts from several official Facebook accounts of news websites in multiple languages. Our team, Narrative Navigators, achieved third place in both the Bias Guidelines and Bias Consistency tracks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. We achieved an IAA Kappa score of 39.4 for bias annotation and 12.8 for propaganda detection. These findings and our performance underscore the need for enhanced media literacy and further research to counter the impact of biased and misleading information on public understanding of the conflict.

Narrative Navigators at FIGNEWS 2024 Shared Task: New Frontiers in Bias and Propaganda Annotation Techniques

In this study, we present a novel approach to annotating bias and propaganda in social media data by leveraging topic modeling techniques. Utilizing the BERTopic tool, we performed topic modeling on the FIGNEWS Shared-task dataset, which initially comprised 13,500 samples. From this dataset, we identified 35 distinct topics and selected approximately 50 representative samples from each topic, resulting in a subset of 1,812 samples. These selected samples were meticulously annotated for bias and propaganda labels. Subsequently, we employed multiple methods like KNN, SVC, XGBoost, and RAG to develop a classifier capable of detecting bias and propaganda within social media content. Our approach demonstrates the efficacy of using topic modeling for efficient data subset selection and provides a robust foundation for improving the accuracy of bias and propaganda detection in large-scale social media datasets.

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