UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection with Domain-Specific Trained BERT

Andrei Paraschiv, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Mihai Dascalu


Abstract
Manipulative and misleading news have become a commodity for some online news outlets and these news have gained a significant impact on the global mindset of people. Propaganda is a frequently employed manipulation method having as goal to influence readers by spreading ideas meant to distort or manipulate their opinions. This paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2020, Task 11: Detection of PropagandaTechniques in News Articles competition. Our approach considers specializing a pre-trained BERT model on propagandistic and hyperpartisan news articles, enabling it to create more adequate representations for the two subtasks, namely propaganda Span Identification (SI) and propaganda Technique Classification (TC). Our proposed system achieved a F1-score of 46.060% in subtask SI, ranking 5th in the leaderboard from 36 teams and a micro-averaged F1 score of 54.302% for subtask TC, ranking 19th from 32 teams.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.244
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:
1853–1857
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.244
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.244
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrei Paraschiv, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, and Mihai Dascalu. 2020. UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection with Domain-Specific Trained BERT. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1853–1857, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection with Domain-Specific Trained BERT (Paraschiv et al., SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.244.pdf