Leveraging Declarative Knowledge in Text and First-Order Logic for Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection

Ruize Wang, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou


Abstract
We study the detection of propagandistic text fragments in news articles. Instead of merely learning from input-output datapoints in training data, we introduce an approach to inject declarative knowledge of fine-grained propaganda techniques. Specifically, we leverage the declarative knowledge expressed in both first-order logic and natural language. The former refers to the logical consistency between coarse- and fine-grained predictions, which is used to regularize the training process with propositional Boolean expressions. The latter refers to the literal definition of each propaganda technique, which is utilized to get class representations for regularizing the model parameters. We conduct experiments on Propaganda Techniques Corpus, a large manually annotated dataset for fine-grained propaganda detection. Experiments show that our method achieves superior performance, demonstrating that leveraging declarative knowledge can help the model to make more accurate predictions.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.320
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3895–3903
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.320
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.320
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruize Wang, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang, Daxin Jiang, and Ming Zhou. 2020. Leveraging Declarative Knowledge in Text and First-Order Logic for Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3895–3903, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Declarative Knowledge in Text and First-Order Logic for Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection (Wang et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.320.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938876