In this work, we combine the state-of-the-art BERT architecture with the semi-supervised learning technique UDA in order to exploit unlabeled raw data to assess humor and detect propaganda in the tasks 7 and 11 of the SemEval-2020 competition. The use of UDA shows promising results with a systematic improvement of the performances over the four different subtasks, and even outperforms supervised learning with the additional labels of the Funlines dataset.

In this paper we present our system for detecting valence task. The major issue was to apply a state-of-the-art system despite the small dataset provided: the system would quickly overfit. The main idea of our proposal is to use transfer learning, which allows to avoid learning from scratch. Indeed, we start to train a first model to predict if a tweet is positive, negative or neutral. For this we use an external dataset which is larger and similar to the target dataset. Then, the pre-trained model is re-used as the starting point to train a new model that classifies a tweet into one of the seven various levels of sentiment intensity. Our system, trained using transfer learning, achieves 0.776 and 0.763 respectively for Pearson correlation coefficient and weighted quadratic kappa metrics on the subtask evaluation dataset.