Abstract: This paper describes our system (MIC-CIS) details and results of participation in the fine-grained propaganda detection shared task 2019. To address the tasks of sentence (SLC) and fragment level (FLC) propaganda detection, we explore different neural architectures (e.g., CNN, LSTM-CRF and BERT) and extract linguistic (e.g., part-of-speech, named entity, readability, sentiment, emotion, etc.), layout and topical features. Specifically, we have designed multi-granularity and multi-tasking neural architectures to jointly perform both the sentence and fragment level propaganda detection. Additionally, we investigate different ensemble schemes such as majority-voting, relax-voting, etc. to boost overall system performance. Compared to the other participating systems, our submissions are ranked 3rd and 4th in FLC and SLC tasks, respectively.

Introduction: In the age of information dissemination without quality control, it has enabled malicious users to spread misinformation via social media and aim individual users with propaganda campaigns to achieve political and financial gains as well as advance a specific agenda. Often disinformation is complied in the two major forms: fake news and propaganda, where they differ in the sense that the propaganda is possibly built upon true information (e.g., biased, loaded language, repetition, etc.). Prior works BIBREF0, BIBREF1, BIBREF2 in detecting propaganda have focused primarily at document level, typically labeling all articles from a propagandistic news outlet as propaganda and thus, often non-propagandistic articles from the outlet are mislabeled. To this end, EMNLP19DaSanMartino focuses on analyzing the use of propaganda and detecting specific propagandistic techniques in news articles at sentence and fragment level, respectively and thus, promotes explainable AI. For instance, the following text is a propaganda of type `slogan'. Trump tweeted: $\underbrace{\text{`}`{\texttt {BUILD THE WALL!}"}}_{\text{slogan}}$ Shared Task: This work addresses the two tasks in propaganda detection BIBREF3 of different granularities: (1) Sentence-level Classification (SLC), a binary classification that predicts whether a sentence contains at least one propaganda technique, and (2) Fragment-level Classification (FLC), a token-level (multi-label) classification that identifies both the spans and the type of propaganda technique(s). Contributions: (1) To address SLC, we design an ensemble of different classifiers based on Logistic Regression, CNN and BERT, and leverage transfer learning benefits using the pre-trained embeddings/models from FastText and BERT. We also employed different features such as linguistic (sentiment, readability, emotion, part-of-speech and named entity tags, etc.), layout, topics, etc. (2) To address FLC, we design a multi-task neural sequence tagger based on LSTM-CRF and linguistic features to jointly detect propagandistic fragments and its type. Moreover, we investigate performing FLC and SLC jointly in a multi-granularity network based on LSTM-CRF and BERT. (3) Our system (MIC-CIS) is ranked 3rd (out of 12 participants) and 4th (out of 25 participants) in FLC and SLC tasks, respectively.

Question: What participating systems had better results than ones authors submitted?
Answer: For SLC task : Ituorp, ProperGander and YMJA  teams had better results.
For FLC task: newspeak and Antiganda teams had better results.