EURECOM at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Hierarchical Loss and Model Ensembling in Detecting Persuasion Techniques

Youri Peskine, Raphael Troncy, Paolo Papotti


Abstract
This paper describes the submission of team EURECOM at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Memes. We only tackled the first sub-task, consisting of detecting 20 named persuasion techniques in the textual content of memes. We trained multiple BERT-based models (BERT, RoBERTa, BERT pre-trained on harmful detection) using different losses (Cross Entropy, Binary Cross Entropy, Focal Loss and a custom-made hierarchical loss). The best results were obtained by leveraging the hierarchical nature of the data, by outputting ancestor classes and with a hierarchical loss. Our final submission consist of an ensembling of our top-3 best models for each persuasion techniques. We obtain hierarchical F1 scores of 0.655 (English), 0.345 (Bulgarian), 0.442 (North Macedonian) and 0.178 (Arabic) on the test set.
Anthology ID:
2024.semeval-1.172
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, A. Seza Doğruöz, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Giovanni Da San Martino, Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1177–1182
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval-1.172
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.semeval-1.172
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Youri Peskine, Raphael Troncy, and Paolo Papotti. 2024. EURECOM at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Hierarchical Loss and Model Ensembling in Detecting Persuasion Techniques. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024), pages 1177–1182, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EURECOM at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Hierarchical Loss and Model Ensembling in Detecting Persuasion Techniques (Peskine et al., SemEval 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.semeval-1.172.pdf
Supplementary material:
 2024.semeval-1.172.SupplementaryMaterial.txt
Supplementary material:
 2024.semeval-1.172.SupplementaryMaterial.zip