PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent

Jiateng Liu, Lin Ai, Zizhou Liu, Payam Karisani, Zheng Hui, Yi Fung, Preslav Nakov, Julia Hirschberg, Heng Ji


Abstract
Propaganda plays a critical role in shaping public opinion and fueling disinformation. While existing research primarily focuses on identifying propaganda techniques, it lacks the ability to capture the broader motives and the impacts of such content. To address these challenges, we introduce PropaInsight, a conceptual framework grounded in foundational social science research, which systematically dissects propaganda into techniques, arousal appeals, and underlying intent. PropaInsight offers a more granular understanding of how propaganda operates across different contexts. Additionally, we present PropaGaze, a novel dataset that combines human-annotated data with high-quality synthetic data generated through a meticulously designed pipeline. Our experiments show that off-the-shelf LLMs struggle with propaganda analysis, but PropaGaze significantly improves performance. Fine-tuned Llama-7B-Chat achieves 203.4% higher text span IoU in technique identification and 66.2% higher BertScore in appeal analysis compared to 1-shot GPT-4-Turbo. Moreover, PropaGaze complements limited human-annotated data in data-sparse and cross-domain scenarios, demonstrating its potential for comprehensive and generalizable propaganda analysis.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.376
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5607–5628
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.376/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiateng Liu, Lin Ai, Zizhou Liu, Payam Karisani, Zheng Hui, Yi Fung, Preslav Nakov, Julia Hirschberg, and Heng Ji. 2025. PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5607–5628, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.376.pdf