United Arab Emirates

This paper presents the approach taken for the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2022). We participated in Sub-task 1 where the text of a tweet is provided, and the goal is to identify the different propaganda techniques used in it. This problem belongs to multi-label classification. For our solution, we approached leveraging different transformer based pre-trained language models with fine-tuning to solve this problem. We found that MARBERTv2 outperforms in terms of performance where F1-macro is 0.08175 and F1-micro is 0.61116 compared to other language models that we considered. Our method achieved rank 4 in the testing phase of the challenge.

EMNLP 2022

AraProp at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Leveraging Pre-Trained Language Models for Arabic Propaganda Detection

arabic texts

propaganda detection

transformer language models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

workshop paper

Propaganda and the spreading of fake news through social media have become a serious problem in recent years. In this paper we present our approach for the shared task on propaganda detection in Arabic in which the goal is to identify propaganda techniques in the Arabic social media text. We propose a semantic similarity detection model to compare text in the test set with the sentences in the train set to find the most similar instances. The label of the target text is obtained from the most similar texts in the train set. The proposed model obtained the micro F1 score of 0.494 on the text data set.

TUB at WANLP22 Shared Task: Using Semantic Similarity for Propaganda Detection in Arabic

The spread of propaganda through the internet has increased drastically over the past years. Lately, propaganda detection has started gaining importance because of the negative impact it has on society. In this work, we describe our approach for the WANLP 2022 shared task which handles the task of propaganda detection in a multi-label setting. The task demands the model to label the given text as having one or more types of propaganda techniques. There are a total of 21 propaganda techniques to be detected. We show that an ensemble of five models performs the best on the task, scoring a micro-F1 score of 59.73%. We also conduct comprehensive ablations and propose various future directions for this work.

ChavanKane at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Large Language Models for Multi-label Propaganda Detection

Nowadays, the rapid dissemination of data on digital platforms has resulted in the emergence of information pollution and data contamination, specifically mis-information, mal-information, dis-information, fake news, and various types of propaganda. These topics are now posing a serious threat to the online digital realm, posing numerous challenges to social media platforms and governments around the world. In this article, we propose a propaganda detection model based on the transformer-based model AraBERT, with the objective of using this framework to detect propagandistic content in the Arabic social media text scene, well with purpose of making online Arabic news and media consumption healthier and safer. Given the dataset, our results are relatively encouraging, indicating a huge potential for this line of approaches in Arabic online news text NLP.

AraBERT Model for Propaganda Detection

In today's time, online users are regularly exposed to media posts that are propagandistic. Several strategies have been developed to promote safer media consumption in Arabic to combat this. However, there is a limited available multilabel annotated social media dataset. In this work, we have used a pre-trained AraBERT twitter-base model on an expanded train data via data augmentation. Our team CNLP-NITS-PP, has achieved the third rank in subtask 1 at WANLP-2022, for propaganda detection in Arabic (shared task) in terms of micro-F1 score of 0.602.

CNLP-NITS-PP at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic using Data Augmentation and AraBERT Pre-trained Model

This paper presents the system developed by the NGU_CNLP team for addressing the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at WANLP 2022. The team participated in the shared tasks' two sub-tasks which are: 1) Propaganda technique identification in text and 2) Propaganda technique span identification. In the first sub-task, the goal is to detect all employed propaganda techniques in some given piece of text out of a possible 17 different techniques or to detect that no propaganda technique is being used in that piece of text. As such, this first sub-task is a multi-label classification problem with a pool of 18 possible labels. Subtask 2 extends sub-task 1, by requiring the identification of the exact text span in which a propaganda technique was employed, making it a sequence labeling problem. For task 1, a combination of a data augmentation strategy coupled with an enabled transformer-based model comprised our classification model. This classification model ranked first amongst the 14 systems participating in this subtask. For sub-task two, a transfer learning model was adopted. The system ranked third among the 3 different models that participated in this subtask.

NGU_CNLP atWANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic

Transliteration is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) which aims to convert a name in the source language to the target language without changing its pronunciation. Particularly, transliteration from English to Arabic is highly needed in many applications, especially in countries (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)) whose most citizens are foreigners but the official language is Arabic. In such a task-oriented scenario, namely transliterating the English names to the corresponding Arabic ones, the performance of the transliteration model is highly important. However, most existing neural approaches mainly apply a universal transliteration model with advanced encoders and decoders to the task, where limited attention is paid to leveraging the phonemic association between English and Arabic to further improve model performance. In this paper, we focus on transliteration of people's names from English to Arabic for the general public. In doing so, we collect a corpus named EANames by extracting high quality name pairs from online resources which better represent the names in the general public than linked Wikipedia entries that are always names of famous people). We propose a model for English-Arabic transliteration, where a memory module modeling the phonemic association between English and Arabic is used to guide the transliteration process. We run experiments on the collected data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for English-Arabic transliteration.

Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories

Microaggressions are subtle manifestations of bias (Breitfeller et al., 2019). These demonstrations of bias can often be classified as a subset of abusive language. However, not as much focus has been placed on the recognition of these instances. In this study, we introduce an unsupervised method to detect microaggressions in natural language expressions. The algorithm relies on pre-trained word-embeddings, leveraging the bias encoded in the model in order to detect microaggressions in unseen textual instances. We test the method on a dataset of
racial and gender-based microaggressions, reporting promising results.

Leveraging Bias in Pre-trained Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Microaggression Detection

The major component of a news item that aids in giving a quick peek at the article's theme is the headline. The process of creating a headline involves summarizing an article to produce a summary that is sufficient in terms of clarity and consistency. Although many different types of research have been done in the domain of headline generation, it is still difficult to create an effective machine-generated title. Additionally, those methods do not work well for morphologically rich languages like Amharic. We proposed a neural headline generation model using transformers and different types of embedding techniques.

Transformer Based Amharic Headline Generation using Sub-word2Vec Representation

Building a question answering (QA) model with less annotation costs can be achieved by utilizing active learning (AL) training strategy. It selects the most informative unlabeled training data to update the model effectively. Acquisition functions for AL are used to determine how informative each training example is, such as uncertainty or diversity based sampling. In this work, we propose a perturbation-based active learning acquisition strategy and demonstrate it is more effective than existing commonly used strategies for the QA task.

Perturbation-based Active Learning for Question Answering

Identification of hate speech (HS) on social media platforms has become a Sisyphean task with the increment of web data availability and the human knack for discovering loopholes in the existing HS detection algorithms.This study conducts a comparative analysis of the merits of using two transformer approaches for HS detection: BART and RoBERTa. By considering popular benchmark data sets, we show that the BART outperforms RoBERTa for the monolingual classification of both finding hate and non-hate as well as classifying hate speech into categories.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2022

TUB at WANLP22 Shared Task: Using Semantic Similarity for Propaganda Detection in Arabic

Similar lecture

ChavanKane at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Large Language Models for Multi-label Propaganda Detection

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2022

TUB at WANLP22 Shared Task: Using Semantic Similarity for Propaganda Detection in Arabic

Similar lecture

ChavanKane at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Large Language Models for Multi-label Propaganda Detection

Downloads