Reliable News or Propagandist News? A Neurosymbolic Model Using Genre, Topic, and Persuasion Techniques to Improve Robustness in Classification

Géraud Faye, Benjamin Icard, Morgane Casanova, Guillaume Gadek, Guillaume Gravier, Wassila Ouerdane, Celine Hudelot, Sylvain Gatepaille, Paul Égré


Abstract
Among news disorders, propagandist news are particularly insidious, because they tend to mix oriented messages with factual reports intended to look like reliable news. To detect propaganda, extant approaches based on Language Models such as BERT are promising but often overfit their training datasets, due to biases in data collection. To enhance classification robustness and improve generalization to new sources, we propose a neurosymbolic approach combining non-contextual text embeddings (fastText) with symbolic conceptual features such as genre, topic, and persuasion techniques. Results show improvements over equivalent text-only methods, and ablation studies as well as explainability analyses confirm the benefits of the added features. Keywords: Information disorder, Fake news, Propaganda, Classification, Topic modeling, Hybrid method, Neurosymbolic model, Ablation, Robustness
Anthology ID:
2026.indor-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Information Disorder (InDor) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Simona Frenda, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Shaina Ashraf, Ada Ren, Ioannis Konstas, Usman Naseem
Venues:
InDor | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
55–65
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-indor-06
DOI:
10.63317/2nn33a2we7xp
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Géraud Faye, Benjamin Icard, Morgane Casanova, Guillaume Gadek, Guillaume Gravier, Wassila Ouerdane, Celine Hudelot, Sylvain Gatepaille, and Paul Égré. 2026. Reliable News or Propagandist News? A Neurosymbolic Model Using Genre, Topic, and Persuasion Techniques to Improve Robustness in Classification. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Information Disorder (InDor) @ LREC 2026, pages 55–65, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Reliable News or Propagandist News? A Neurosymbolic Model Using Genre, Topic, and Persuasion Techniques to Improve Robustness in Classification (Faye et al., InDor 2026)
Copy Citation: