@inproceedings{biswas-etal-2024-mememind,
    title = "{M}eme{M}ind at {A}r{AIE}val Shared Task: Spotting Persuasive Spans in {A}rabic Text with Persuasion Techniques Identification",
    author = "Biswas, Md. Rafiul  and
      Shah, Zubair  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi",
    editor = "Habash, Nizar  and
      Bouamor, Houda  and
      Eskander, Ramy  and
      Tomeh, Nadi  and
      Abu Farha, Ibrahim  and
      Abdelali, Ahmed  and
      Touileb, Samia  and
      Hamed, Injy  and
      Onaizan, Yaser  and
      Alhafni, Bashar  and
      Antoun, Wissam  and
      Khalifa, Salam  and
      Haddad, Hatem  and
      Zitouni, Imed  and
      AlKhamissi, Badr  and
      Almatham, Rawan  and
      Mrini, Khalil",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.arabicnlp-1.50/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.arabicnlp-1.50",
    pages = "494--500",
    abstract = "This paper focuses on detecting propagandistic spans and persuasion techniques in Arabic text from tweets and news paragraphs. Each entry in the dataset contains a text sample and corresponding labels that indicate the start and end positions of propaganda techniques within the text. Tokens falling within a labeled span were assigned `B' (Begin) or `I' (Inside) tags, `O', corresponding to the specific propaganda technique. Using attention masks, we created uniform lengths for each span and assigned BIO tags to each token based on the provided labels. Then, we used AraBERT-base pre-trained model for Arabic text tokenization and embeddings with a token classification layer to identify propaganda techniques. Our training process involves a two-phase fine-tuning approach. First, we train only the classification layer for a few epochs, followed by full model fine-tuning, updating all parameters. This methodology allows the model to adapt to the specific characteristics of the propaganda detection task while leveraging the knowledge captured by the pretrained AraBERT model. Our approach achieved an F1 score of 0.2774, securing the 3rd position in the leaderboard of Task 1."
}