Team DiSaster at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Combining BERT and Hand-crafted Features for Identifying Propaganda Techniques in News

Anders Kaas, Viktor Torp Thomsen, Barbara Plank


Abstract
The identification of communication techniques in news articles such as propaganda is important, as such techniques can influence the opinions of large numbers of people. Most work so far focused on the identification at the news article level. Recently, a new dataset and shared task has been proposed for the identification of propaganda techniques at the finer-grained span level. This paper describes our system submission to the subtask of technique classification (TC) for the SemEval 2020 shared task on detection of propaganda techniques in news articles. We propose a method of combining neural BERT representations with hand-crafted features via stacked generalization. Our model has the added advantage that it combines the power of contextual representations from BERT with simple span-based and article-based global features. We present an ablation study which shows that even though BERT representations are very powerful also for this task, BERT still benefits from being combined with carefully designed task-specific features.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.238
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona (online)
Editors:
Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu, Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
International Committee for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1817–1822
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.238
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.238
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anders Kaas, Viktor Torp Thomsen, and Barbara Plank. 2020. Team DiSaster at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Combining BERT and Hand-crafted Features for Identifying Propaganda Techniques in News. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1817–1822, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Team DiSaster at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Combining BERT and Hand-crafted Features for Identifying Propaganda Techniques in News (Kaas et al., SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.238.pdf