ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Techniques and Disinformation Detection in Arabic Text

We present an overview of the ArAIEval shared task, organized as part of the first ArabicNLP 2023 conference co-located with EMNLP 2023. ArAIEval offers two tasks over Arabic text: (i) persuasion technique detection, focusing on identifying persuasion techniques in tweets and news articles, and (ii) disinformation detection in binary and multiclass setups over tweets. A total of 20 teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with 14 and 16 teams participating in Tasks 1 and 2, respectively. Across both tasks, we observed that fine-tuning transformer models such as AraBERT was at the core of the majority of the participating systems. We provide a description of the task setup, including a description of the dataset construction and the evaluation setup. We further give a brief overview of the participating systems. All datasets and evaluation scripts from the shared task are released to the research community. (https://araieval.gitlab.io/) We hope this will enable further research on these important tasks in Arabic.

Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence

Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated behavior perform static analyses, disregarding the temporal dynamics of coordination. Here, we carry out the first dynamic analysis of coordinated behavior. To reach our goal we build a multiplex temporal network and we perform dynamic community detection to identify groups of users that exhibited coordinated behaviors in time. Thanks to our novel approach we find that: (i) coordinated communities feature variable degrees of temporal instability; (ii) dynamic analyses are needed to account for such instability, and results of static analyses can be unreliable and scarcely representative of unstable communities; (iii) some users exhibit distinct archetypal behaviors that have important practical implications; (iv) content and network characteristics contribute to explaining why users leave and join coordinated communities. Our results demonstrate the advantages of dynamic analyses and open up new directions of research on the unfolding of online debates, on the strategies of coordinated communities, and on the patterns of online influence.

Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic

Propaganda is the expression of an opinion or an action by an individual or a group deliberately designed to influence the opinions or the actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends, which is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda techniques are commonly used in social media to manipulate or to mislead users. Thus, there has been a lot of recent research on automatic detection of propaganda techniques in text as well as in memes. However, so far the focus has been primarily on English. With the aim to bridge this language gap, we ran a shared task on detecting propaganda techniques in Arabic tweets as part of the WANLP 2022 workshop, which included two subtasks. Subtask~1 asks to identify the set of propaganda techniques used in a tweet, which is a multilabel classification problem, while Subtask~2 asks to detect the propaganda techniques used in a tweet together with the exact span(s) of text in which each propaganda technique appears. The task attracted 63 team registrations, and eventually 14 and 3 teams made submissions for subtask 1 and 2, respectively. Finally, 11 teams submitted system description papers.

Detecting and Understanding Harmful Memes: A Survey

The automatic identification of harmful content online is of major concern for social media platforms, policymakers, and society. Researchers have studied textual, visual, and audio content, but typically in isolation. Yet, harmful content often combines multiple modalities, as in the case of memes, which are of particular interest due to their viral nature. With this in mind, here we offer a comprehensive survey with a focus on harmful memes. Based on a systematic analysis of recent literature, we first propose a new typology of harmful memes, and then we highlight and summarize the relevant state of the art. One interesting finding is that many types of harmful memes are not really studied, e.g., such featuring self-harm and extremism, partly due to the lack of suitable datasets. We further find that existing datasets mostly capture multi-class scenarios, which are not inclusive of the affective spectrum that memes can represent. Another observation is that memes can propagate globally through repackaging in different languages and that they can also be multilingual, blending different cultures. We conclude by highlighting several challenges related to multimodal semiotics, technological constraints and non-trivial social engagement, and we present several open-ended aspects such as delineating online harm and empirically examining related frameworks and assistive interventions, which we believe will motivate and drive future research.

The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media

Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of \textit{propaganda} to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and to amplify its impact. Despite the connection between them, these two characteristics have so far been considered in isolation. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we analyze the spread of propaganda and its interplay with coordinated behavior on a large Twitter dataset about the 2019 UK general election. We first propose and evaluate several metrics for measuring the use of propaganda on Twitter. Then, we investigate the use of propaganda by different coordinated communities that participated in the online debate. The combination of the use of propaganda and coordinated behavior allows us to uncover the authenticity and harmfulness of the different communities. Finally, we compare our measures of propaganda and coordination with automation (i.e., bot) scores and Twitter suspensions, revealing interesting trends. From a theoretical viewpoint, we introduce a methodology for analyzing several important dimensions of online behavior that are seldom conjointly considered. From a practical viewpoint, we provide new insights into authentic and inauthentic online activities during the 2019 UK general election.

Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat!: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims

We present an overview of the second edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2019. The lab featured two tasks in two different languages: English and Arabic. Task 1 (English) challenged the participating systems to predict which claims in a political debate or speech should be prioritized for fact-checking. Task 2 (Arabic) asked to (A) rank a given set of Web pages with respect to a check-worthy claim based on their usefulness for fact-checking that claim, (B) classify these same Web pages according to their degree of usefulness for fact-checking the target claim, (C) identify useful passages from these pages, and (D) use the useful pages to predict the claim's factuality. CheckThat! provided a full evaluation framework, consisting of data in English (derived from fact-checking sources) and Arabic (gathered and annotated from scratch) and evaluation based on mean average precision (MAP) and normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) for ranking, and F1 for classification. A total of 47 teams registered to participate in this lab, and fourteen of them actually submitted runs (compared to nine last year). The evaluation results show that the most successful approaches to Task 1 used various neural networks and logistic regression. As for Task 2, learning-to-rank was used by the highest scoring runs for subtask A, while different classifiers were used in the other subtasks. We release to the research community all datasets from the lab as well as the evaluation scripts, which should enable further research in the important tasks of check-worthiness estimation and automatic claim verification.

Findings of the NLP4IF-2021 Shared Tasks on Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic and Censorship Detection

We present the results and the main findings of the NLP4IF-2021 shared tasks. Task 1 focused on fighting the COVID-19 infodemic in social media, and it was offered in Arabic, Bulgarian, and English. Given a tweet, it asked to predict whether that tweet contains a verifiable claim, and if so, whether it is likely to be false, is of general interest, is likely to be harmful, and is worthy of manual fact-checking; also, whether it is harmful to society, and whether it requires the attention of policy makers. Task~2 focused on censorship detection, and was offered in Chinese. A total of ten teams submitted systems for task 1, and one team participated in task 2; nine teams also submitted a system description paper. Here, we present the tasks, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. Most submissions achieved sizable improvements over several baselines, and the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles. The data, the scorers and the leaderboards for the tasks are available at http://gitlab.com/NLP4IF/nlp4if-2021.

Overview of the CLEF--2021 CheckThat! Lab on Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News

We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality, and covers Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to predict which posts in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking, focusing on COVID-19 and politics (in all five languages). Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims (in Arabic and English). Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of a news article and its topical domain (in English). The evaluation is based on mean average precision or precision at rank k for the ranking tasks, and macro-F1 for the classification tasks. This was the most popular CLEF-2021 lab in terms of team registrations: 132 teams. Nearly one-third of them participated: 15, 5, and 25 teams submitted official runs for tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively.

A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News About COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar

While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer fake news may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. We found that Arabic tweets contain a lot of false information and rumors, while English tweets are mostly factual. However, English tweets are much more propagandistic than Arabic ones. In terms of propaganda techniques, about half of the Arabic tweets express doubt, and 1/5 use loaded language, while English tweets are abundant in loaded language, exaggeration, fear, name-calling, doubt, and flag-waving. Finally, in terms of framing, Arabic tweets adopt a health and safety perspective, while in English economic concerns dominate.

Assisting the Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims in a Document

Given the recent proliferation of false claims online, there has been a lot of manual fact-checking effort. As this is very time-consuming, human fact-checkers can benefit from tools that can support them and make them more efficient. Here, we focus on building a system that could provide such support. Given an input document, it aims to detect all sentences that contain a claim that can be verified by some previously fact-checked claims (from a given database). The output is a re-ranked list of the document sentences, so that those that can be verified are ranked as high as possible, together with corresponding evidence. Unlike previous work, which has looked into claim retrieval, here we take a document-level perspective. We create a new manually annotated dataset for the task, and we propose suitable evaluation measures. We further experiment with a learning-to-rank approach, achieving sizable performance gains over several strong baselines. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of modeling text similarity and stance, while also taking into account the veracity of the retrieved previously fact-checked claims. We believe that this research would be of interest to fact-checkers, journalists, media, and regulatory authorities.