Marta Vázquez Abuín

Also published as: Marta V\'azquez Abu{\'\i}n


2026

Detecting hyperpartisan narratives and Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories (PRCT) is essential to addressing the spread of misinformation. These complex narratives pose a significant threat, as hyperpartisanship drives political polarisation and institutional distrust, while PRCTs directly motivate real-world extremist violence, making their identification critical for social cohesion and public safety. However, existing resources are scarce, predominantly English-centric, and often analyse hyperpartisanship, stance, and rhetorical bias in isolation rather than as interrelated aspects of political discourse. To bridge this gap, we introduce PartisanLens, the first multilingual dataset of 1617 hyperpartisan news headlines in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, annotated in multiple political discourse aspects. We first evaluate the classification performance of widely used Large Language Models (LLMs) on this dataset, establishing robust baselines for the classification of hyperpartisan and PRCT narratives. In addition, we assess the viability of using LLMs as automatic annotators for this task, analysing their ability to approximate human annotation. Results highlight both their potential and current limitations. Next, moving beyond standard judgments, we explore whether LLMs can emulate human annotation patterns by conditioning them on socio-economic and ideological profiles that simulate annotator perspectives. At last, we provide our resources and evaluation; PartisanLens supports future research on detecting partisan and conspiratorial narratives in European contexts.
The linguistic proximity between Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish results in a lexical overlap that often conceals semantic interference. This is particularly evident in false friends, posing a challenge for NLP systems.In this work, we assess whether state-of-the-art language models can identify and process false friends among these languages. We introduce six cross-lingual datasets –created manually or using semi-automatic methods, with all instances being carefully verified– covering cognates and false friends. We evaluate a broad range of encoder and decoder models of varying sizes via zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our results highlight the challenging nature of the task, but also show the clear progress made by LLMs in recent years, particularly those of a larger size, with smaller language models struggling on the task. Notably, unlike other tasks where language distance poses additional challenges, we find that linguistic proximity itself introduces errors: closely related language pairs tend to perform worse, reflecting the challenge of semantic discrimination due to lexical overlap.

2025

This work explores the impact of dataset quality and composition on Word-in-Context performance for Galician and Spanish. We assess existing datasets, validate their test sets, and create new manually constructed evaluation data. Across five experiments with controlled variations in training and test data, we find that while the validation of test data tends to yield better model performance, evaluations on manually created datasets suggest that contextual embeddings are not sufficient on their own to reliably capture word meaning variation. Regarding training data, our results suggest that performance is influenced not only by size and human validation but also by deeper factors related to the semantic properties of the datasets. All new resources will be freely released.

2024