Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles

Seunghak Yu, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mitra Mohtarami, James Glass, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
Online users today are exposed to misleading and propagandistic news articles and media posts on a daily basis. To counter thus, a number of approaches have been designed aiming to achieve a healthier and safer online news and media consumption. Automatic systems are able to support humans in detecting such content; yet, a major impediment to their broad adoption is that besides being accurate, the decisions of such systems need also to be interpretable in order to be trusted and widely adopted by users. Since misleading and propagandistic content influences readers through the use of a number of deception techniques, we propose to detect and to show the use of such techniques as a way to offer interpretability. In particular, we define qualitatively descriptive features and we analyze their suitability for detecting deception techniques. We further show that our interpretable features can be easily combined with pre-trained language models, yielding state-of-the-art results.
Anthology ID:
2021.ranlp-1.179
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)
Month:
September
Year:
2021
Address:
Held Online
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
1597–1605
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.179
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seunghak Yu, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mitra Mohtarami, James Glass, and Preslav Nakov. 2021. Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), pages 1597–1605, Held Online. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles (Yu et al., RANLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.179.pdf