This paper presents the submission to semeval-2020 task 11, Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. Knowing that there are two subtasks in this competition, we have participated in the Technique Classification subtask (TC), which aims to identify the propaganda techniques used in a specific propaganda span. We have used and implemented various models to detect propaganda. Our proposed model is based on BERT uncased pre-trained language model as it has achieved state-of-the-art performance on multiple NLP benchmarks. The performance results of our proposed model have scored 0.55307 F1-Score, which outperforms the baseline model provided by the organizers with 0.2519 F1-Score, and our model is 0.07 away from the best performing team. Compared to other participating systems, our submission is ranked 15th out of 31 participants.

The internet and the high use of social media have enabled the modern-day journalism to publish, share and spread news that is difficult to distinguish if it is true or fake. Defining “fake news” is not well established yet, however, it can be categorized under several labels: false, biased, or framed to mislead the readers that are characterized as propaganda. Digital content production technologies with logical fallacies and emotional language can be used as propaganda techniques to gain more readers or mislead the audience. Recently, several researchers have proposed deep learning (DL) models to address this issue. This research paper provides an ensemble deep learning model using BiLSTM, XGBoost, and BERT to detect propaganda. The proposed model has been applied on the dataset provided by the challenge NLP4IF 2019, Task 1 Sentence Level Classification (SLC) and it shows a significant performance over the baseline model.