Can GPT-4 Identify Propaganda? Annotation and Detection of Propaganda Spans in News Articles

The use of propaganda has spiked on mainstream and social media, aiming to manipulate or mislead users. While efforts to automatically detect propaganda techniques in textual, visual, or multimodal content have increased, most of them primarily focus on English content. The majority of the recent initiatives targeting medium to low-resource languages produced relatively small annotated datasets, with a skewed distribution, posing challenges for the development of sophisticated propaganda detection models. To address this challenge, we carefully develop the largest propaganda dataset to date, ArPro, comprised of 8K paragraphs from newspaper articles, labeled at the text span level following a taxonomy of 23 propagandistic techniques. Furthermore, our work offers the first attempt to understand the performance of large language models (LLMs), using GPT-4, for fine-grained propaganda detection from text. Results showed that GPT-4's performance degrades as the task moves from simply classifying a paragraph as propagandistic or not, to the fine-grained task of detecting propaganda techniques and their manifestation in text. Compared to models fine-tuned on the dataset for propaganda detection at different classification granularities, GPT-4 is still far behind. Finally, we evaluate GPT-4 on a dataset consisting of six other languages for span detection, and results suggest that the model struggles with the task across languages. Our dataset and resources will be released to the community.

Large Language Models for Propaganda Span Annotation

The use of propagandistic techniques in online communication has increased in recent years, aiming to manipulate online audiences. Efforts to automatically detect and debunk such content have been made, addressing various modeling scenarios. These include determining whether the content (text, image, or multimodal) (i) is propagandistic, (ii) employs one or more techniques, and (iii) includes techniques with identifiable spans. Significant research efforts have been devoted to the first two scenarios compared to the latter. Therefore, in this study, we focus on the task of detecting propagandistic textual spans. We investigate whether large language models such as GPT-4 can be utilized to perform the task of an annotator. For the experiments, we used an in-house developed dataset consisting of annotations from multiple annotators. Our results suggest that providing more information to the model as prompts improves the annotation agreement and performance compared to human annotations. We plan to make the annotated labels from multiple annotators, including GPT-4, available for the community.

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.

LLMeBench: A Flexible Framework for Accelerating LLMs Benchmarking

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework. Initially developed to evaluate Arabic NLP tasks using OpenAI's GPT and BLOOM models; it can be seamlessly customized for any NLP task and model, regardless of language. The framework also features zero- and few-shot learning settings. A new custom dataset can be added in less than 10 minutes, and users can use their own model API keys to evaluate the task at hand. The developed framework has been already tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We plan to open-source the framework for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/). A video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/FkQn4UjYA0s).

Benchmarking Arabic AI with Large Language Models

With large Foundation Models (FMs), language technologies (AI in general) are entering a new paradigm: eliminating the need for developing large-scale task-specific datasets and supporting a variety of tasks through set-ups ranging from zero-shot to few-shot learning. However, understanding FMs capabilities requires a systematic benchmarking effort by comparing FMs performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. With that goal, past work focused on the English language and included a few efforts with multiple languages. Our study contributes to ongoing research by evaluating FMs performance for standard Arabic NLP and Speech processing, including a range of tasks from sequence tagging to content classification across diverse domains. We start with zero-shot learning using GPT-3.5-turbo, Whisper, and USM, addressing 33 unique tasks using 59 publicly available datasets resulting in 96 test setups. For a few tasks, FMs performs on par or exceeds the performance of the SOTA models but for the majority it under-performs. Given the importance of prompt for the FMs performance, we discuss our prompt strategies in detail and elaborate on our findings. Our future work on Arabic AI will explore few-shot prompting, expand the range of tasks, and investigate additional open-source models.

QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection using Multilingual Models

Misinformation spreading in mainstream and social media has been misleading users in different ways. Manual detection and verification efforts by journalists and fact-checkers can no longer cope with the great scale and quick spread of misleading information. This motivated research and industry efforts to develop systems for analyzing and verifying news spreading online. The SemEval-2023 Task 3 is an attempt to address several subtasks under this overarching problem, targeting writing techniques used in news articles to affect readers' opinions. The task addressed three subtasks with six languages, in addition to three ``surprise'' test languages, resulting in 27 different test setups. This paper describes our participating system to this task. Our team is one of the 6 teams that successfully submitted runs for all setups. The official results show that our system is ranked among the top 3 systems for 10 out of the 27 setups.

Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Check-worthy Claim Identification over Twitter

Misinformation spread over social media has become an undeniable infodemic. However, not all spreading claims are made equal. If propagated, some claims can be destructive, not only on the individual level, but to organizations and even countries. Detecting claims that should be prioritized for fact-checking is considered the first step to fight against spread of fake news. With training data limited to a handful of languages, developing supervised models to tackle the problem over lower-resource languages is currently infeasible. Therefore, our work aims to investigate whether we can use existing datasets to train models for predicting worthiness of verification of claims in tweets in other languages. We present a systematic comparative study of six approaches for cross-lingual check-worthiness estimation across pairs of five diverse languages with the help of Multilingual BERT (mBERT) model. We run our experiments using a state-of-the-art multilingual Twitter dataset. Our results show that for some language pairs, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is possible and can perform as good as monolingual models that are trained on the target language. We also show that in some languages, this approach outperforms (or at least is comparable to) state-of-the-art models.

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.

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.

Automated Fact-Checking for Assisting Human Fact-Checkers

The reporting and analysis of current events around the globe has expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism. Politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences through social media, bypassing the filters of official cables or traditional media. However, the multiple advantages of free speech and direct communication are dimmed by the misuse of the media to spread inaccurate or misleading claims. These phenomena have led to the modern incarnation of the fact-checker -- a professional whose main aim is to examine claims using available evidence to assess their veracity. As in other text forensics tasks, the amount of information available makes the work of the fact-checker more difficult. With this in mind, starting from the perspective of the professional fact-checker, we survey the available intelligent technologies that can support the human expert in the different steps of her fact-checking endeavor. These include identifying claims worth fact-checking; detecting relevant previously fact-checked claims; retrieving relevant evidence to fact-check a claim; and actually verifying a claim. In each case, we pay attention to the challenges in future work and the potential impact on real-world fact-checking.