NarrativeMiners at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Combating Manipulative Narratives in Online News

Muhammad Khubaib, Muhammad Shoaib Khursheed, Muminah Khurram, Abdul Samad, Sandesh Kumar


Abstract
Our team, Narrative Miners, participated in SemEval-2025 Task 10 to tackle the challenge of detecting manipulative narratives in online news, focusing on the Ukraine-Russia war and climate change. We worked on three key subtasks: classifying entity roles, categorizing narratives and subnarratives, and generating concise narrative explanations. Using transformer-based models like BART, BERT, GPT-2, and Flan-T5, we implemented a structured pipeline and applied data augmentation to enhance performance. BART-CNN proved to be our best-performing model, significantly improving classification accuracy and explanation generation. Despite challenges like dataset limitations and class imbalance, our approach demonstrated the effectiveness of hierarchical classification and multilingual analysis in combating online disinformation. We made use of different data augmentation techniques to cover the class imbalances present in the dataset. We had different evaluation metrics set for each subtask, specifically focusing on the need of that particular outcome. With this paper, we hope to play our part in mitigating the impact of harmful disinformation.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.215
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1639–1644
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.215/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Khubaib, Muhammad Shoaib Khursheed, Muminah Khurram, Abdul Samad, and Sandesh Kumar. 2025. NarrativeMiners at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Combating Manipulative Narratives in Online News. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1639–1644, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NarrativeMiners at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Combating Manipulative Narratives in Online News (Khubaib et al., SemEval 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.215.pdf