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arXiv · 1910.02517

Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles

Giovanni Da San Martino·Seunghak Yu·Alberto Barrón-Cedeño·Rostislav Petrov·Preslav Nakov
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Abstract

Propaganda aims at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. Previous work has addressed propaganda detection at the document level, typically labelling all articles from a propagandistic news outlet as propaganda. Such noisy gold labels inevitably affect the quality of any learning system trained on them. A further issue with most existing systems is the lack of explainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel task: performing fine-grained analysis of texts by detecting all fragments that contain propaganda techniques as well as their type. In particular, we create a corpus of news articles manually annotated at the fragment level with eighteen propaganda techniques and we propose a suitable evaluation measure. We further design a novel multi-granularity neural network, and we show that it outperforms several strong BERT-based baselines.

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Giovanni Da San Martino, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Rostislav Petrov, Preslav Nakov. 2019-10-06. Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02517

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