Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection

Abdelrhman Saleh, Ramy Baly, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mitra Mohtarami, Preslav Nakov, James Glass


Abstract
We describe our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on Hyperpartisan News Detection. We rely on a variety of engineered features originally used to detect propaganda. This is based on the assumption that biased messages are propagandistic and promote a particular political cause or viewpoint. In particular, we trained a logistic regression model with features ranging from simple bag of words to vocabulary richness and text readability. Our system achieved 72.9% accuracy on the manually annotated testset, and 60.8% on the test data that was obtained with distant supervision. Additional experiments showed that significant performance gains can be achieved with better feature pre-processing.
Anthology ID:
S19-2182
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Editors:
Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova, Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu, Marianna Apidianaki, Saif M. Mohammad
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1041–1046
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-2182
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S19-2182
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdelrhman Saleh, Ramy Baly, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mitra Mohtarami, Preslav Nakov, and James Glass. 2019. Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1041–1046, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection (Saleh et al., SemEval 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-2182.pdf