Matt Pauk


2024

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Pauk at SemEval-2024 Task 4: A Neuro-Symbolic Method for Consistent Classification of Propaganda Techniques in Memes
Matt Pauk | Maria Leonor Pacheco
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

Memes play a key role in most modern informa-tion campaigns, particularly propaganda cam-paigns. Identifying the persuasive techniquespresent in memes is an important step in de-veloping systems to recognize and curtail pro-paganda. This work presents a framework toidentify the persuasive techniques present inmemes for the SemEval 2024 Task 4, accordingto a hierarchical taxonomy of propaganda tech-niques. The framework involves a knowledgedistillation method, where the base model is acombination of DeBERTa and ResNET usedto classify the text and image, and the teachermodel consists of a group of weakly enforcedlogic rules that promote the hierarchy of per-suasion techniques. The addition of the logicrule layer for knowledge distillation shows im-provement in respecting the hierarchy of thetaxonomy with a slight boost in performance.