@inproceedings{saravanan-wilson-2025-cocoa,
    title = "cocoa at {S}em{E}val-2025 Task 10: Prompting vs. Fine-Tuning: A Multilevel Approach to Propaganda Classification",
    author = "Saravanan, Vineet  and
      Wilson, Steven",
    editor = "Rosenthal, Sara  and
      Ros{\'a}, Aiala  and
      Ghosh, Debanjan  and
      Zampieri, Marcos",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.82/",
    pages = "590--594",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-273-2",
    abstract = "The increasing sophistication of natural language processing models has facilitated advancements in hierarchical text classification, particularly in the domain of propaganda detection. This paper presents our submission to SemEval 2025 Task 10, Subtask 1, which focuses on multilevel text classification for identifying and categorizing propaganda narratives in online news. We investigate two primary approaches: (1) prompt-based classification using large language models (LLMs) like GPT, which offers flexibility but struggles with hierarchical categorization, and (2) fine-tuning transformer-based models, where we employ a hierarchical structure{---}one model classifies the main propaganda category, followed by three separate models specializing in subcategory classification. Our results indicate that while LLMs demonstrate some generalization ability, fine-tuned models significantly outperform them in accuracy and reliability, reinforcing the importance of task-specific supervised learning for propaganda detection. Additionally, we discuss challenges related to data sparsity in subclassification and explore potential enhancements such as multi-task learning and hierarchical loss functions. Our findings contribute to the broader field of automated propaganda detection and emphasize the value of structured classification models in combating misinformation. All code and data used in our experiments will be made publicly available on our GitHub"
}