Detecting Manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram: A Transformer-Based Approach to Technique Classification and Span Identification

Md. Abdur Rahman, Md Ashiqur Rahman


Abstract
The Russia-Ukraine war has transformed social media into a critical battleground for information warfare, making the detection of manipulation techniques in online content an urgent security concern. This work presents our system developed for the UNLP 2025 Shared Tasks, which addresses both manipulation technique classification and span identification in Ukrainian Telegram posts. In this paper, we have explored several machine learning approaches (LR, SVC, GB, NB) , deep learning architectures (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU hybrid) and state-of-the-art multilingual transformers (mDeBERTa, InfoXLM, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa). Our experiments showed that fine-tuning transformer models for the specific tasks significantly improved their performance, with XLM-RoBERTa large delivering the best results by securing 3rd place in technique classification task with a Macro F1 score of 0.4551 and 2nd place in span identification task with a span F1 score of 0.6045. These results demonstrate that large pre-trained multilingual models effectively detect subtle manipulation tactics in Slavic languages, advancing the development of tools to combat online manipulation in political contexts.
Anthology ID:
2025.unlp-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Workshop (UNLP 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria (online)
Editor:
Mariana Romanyshyn
Venues:
UNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
203–213
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.unlp-1.20/
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Cite (ACL):
Md. Abdur Rahman and Md Ashiqur Rahman. 2025. Detecting Manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram: A Transformer-Based Approach to Technique Classification and Span Identification. In Proceedings of the Fourth Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Workshop (UNLP 2025), pages 203–213, Vienna, Austria (online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram: A Transformer-Based Approach to Technique Classification and Span Identification (Rahman & Rahman, UNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.unlp-1.20.pdf