Tropes — recurring narrative elements like the “smoking gun” or the “veil of secrecy” — are often used in movies to convey familiar patterns. However, they also play a significant role in online communication about societal issues, where they can oversimplify complex matters and deteriorate public discourse. Recognizing these tropes can offer insights into the emotional manipulation and potential bias present in online discussions. This paper addresses the challenge of automatically detecting tropes in social media posts. We define the task, distinguish it from previous work, and create a ground-truth dataset of social media posts related to vaccines and immigration, manually labeled with tropes. Using this dataset, we develop a supervised machine learning technique for multi-label classification, fine-tune a model, and demonstrate its effectiveness experimentally. Our results show that tropes are common across domains and that fine-tuned models can detect them with high accuracy.

This paper describes the submission of team EURECOM at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Memes. We only tackled the first sub-task, consisting of detecting 20 named persuasion techniques in the textual content of memes. We trained multiple BERT-based models (BERT, RoBERTa, BERT pre-trained on harmful detection) using different losses (Cross Entropy, Binary Cross Entropy, Focal Loss and a custom-made hierarchical loss). The best results were obtained by leveraging the hierarchical nature of the data, by outputting ancestor classes and with a hierarchical loss. Our final submission consist of an ensembling of our top-3 best models for each persuasion techniques. We obtain hierarchical F1 scores of 0.655 (English), 0.345 (Bulgarian), 0.442 (North Macedonian) and 0.178 (Arabic) on the test set.

Large language models have recently risen in popularity due to their ability to perform many natural language tasks without requiring any fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on two novel ideas: (1) generating definitions from examples and using them for zero-shot classification, and (2) investigating how an LLM makes use of the definitions. We thoroughly analyze the performance of GPT-3 model for fine-grained multi-label conspiracy theory classification of tweets using zero-shot labeling. In doing so, we asses how to improve the labeling by providing minimal but meaningful context in the form of the definitions of the labels. We compare descriptive noun phrases, human-crafted definitions, introduce a new method to help the model generate definitions from examples, and propose a method to evaluate GPT-3’s understanding of the definitions. We demonstrate that improving definitions of class labels has a direct consequence on the downstream classification results.