Mohamed Ibrahim Ragab
2025
Multilingual Propaganda Detection: Exploring Transformer-Based Models mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and mT5
Mohamed Ibrahim Ragab
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Ensaf Hussein Mohamed
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Walaa Medhat
Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources
This research investigates multilingual propaganda detection by employing transformer-based models, specifically mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and mT5. The study utilizes a balanced dataset from the BiasFigNews corpus, annotated for propaganda and bias across five languages. The models were finely tuned to generate embeddings for classification tasks. The evaluation revealed mT5 as the most effective model, achieving an accuracy of 99.61% and an F1-score of 0.9961, followed by mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa with accuracies of 92% and 91.41%, respectively. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of transformer-based embeddings in detecting propaganda while also highlighting challenges in subtle class distinctions. Future work aims to enhance cross-lingual adaptability and explore lightweight models for resource-constrained settings.