Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article

Giovanni Da San Martino, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Rostislav Petrov, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
Propaganda aims at influencing people’s mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. Previous work has addressed propaganda detection at document level, typically labelling all articles from a propagandistic news outlet as propaganda. Such noisy gold labels inevitably affect the quality of any learning system trained on them. A further issue with most existing systems is the lack of explainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel task: performing fine-grained analysis of texts by detecting all fragments that contain propaganda techniques as well as their type. In particular, we create a corpus of news articles manually annotated at fragment level with eighteen propaganda techniques and propose a suitable evaluation measure. We further design a novel multi-granularity neural network, and we show that it outperforms several strong BERT-based baselines.
Anthology ID:
D19-1565
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5636–5646
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1565
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1565
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giovanni Da San Martino, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Rostislav Petrov, and Preslav Nakov. 2019. Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5636–5646, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article (Da San Martino et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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