Jerome Waßmuth


2024

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MAGPIE: Multi-Task Analysis of Media-Bias Generalization with Pre-Trained Identification of Expressions
Tomáš Horych | Martin Paul Wessel | Jan Philip Wahle | Terry Ruas | Jerome Waßmuth | André Greiner-Petter | Akiko Aizawa | Bela Gipp | Timo Spinde
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Media bias detection poses a complex, multifaceted problem traditionally tackled using single-task models and small in-domain datasets, consequently lacking generalizability. To address this, we introduce MAGPIE, a large-scale multi-task pre-training approach explicitly tailored for media bias detection. To enable large-scale pre-training, we construct Large Bias Mixture (LBM), a compilation of 59 bias-related tasks. MAGPIE outperforms previous approaches in media bias detection on the Bias Annotation By Experts (BABE) dataset, with a relative improvement of 3.3% F1-score. Furthermore, using a RoBERTa encoder, we show that MAGPIE needs only 15% of fine-tuning steps compared to single-task approaches. We provide insight into task learning interference and show that sentiment analysis and emotion detection help learning of all other tasks, and scaling the number of tasks leads to the best results. MAGPIE confirms that MTL is a promising approach for addressing media bias detection, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of existing models. Furthermore, LBM is the first available resource collection focused on media bias MTL.