Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News

Giovanni Da San Martino, Shaden Shaar, Yifan Zhang, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 “infodemic”, have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and disinformation detection. However, little attention has been paid to the specific rhetorical and psychological techniques used to convey propaganda messages. Revealing the use of such techniques can help promote media literacy and critical thinking, and eventually contribute to limiting the impact of “fake news” and disinformation campaigns. Prta (Propaganda Persuasion Techniques Analyzer) allows users to explore the articles crawled on a regular basis by highlighting the spans in which propaganda techniques occur and to compare them on the basis of their use of propaganda techniques. The system further reports statistics about the use of such techniques, overall and over time, or according to filtering criteria specified by the user based on time interval, keywords, and/or political orientation of the media. Moreover, it allows users to analyze any text or URL through a dedicated interface or via an API. The system is available online: https://www.tanbih.org/prta.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-demos.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Asli Celikyilmaz, Tsung-Hsien Wen
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
287–293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.32
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-demos.32
Award:
 Honorable Mention for Best Demonstration Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giovanni Da San Martino, Shaden Shaar, Yifan Zhang, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, and Preslav Nakov. 2020. Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 287–293, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News (Da San Martino et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.32.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928622