PROTECT: A Pipeline for Propaganda Detection and Classification
Authors: Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata (Université Cote d'Azur, 2021)
Topic: Fact Checking and Fake News Detection

Abstract
Propaganda is a rhetorical technique to present opinions with the deliberate goal of influencing the opinions and the actions of other (groups of) individuals for predetermined misleading ends. The employment of such manipulation techniques in politics and news articles, as well as its subsequent spread on social networks, may lead to threatening consequences for the society and its more vulnerable members. In this paper, we present PROTECT (PROpaganda Text dEteCTion), a new system to automatically detect propagandist messages and classify them along with the propaganda techniques employed. PROTECT is designed as a full pipeline to firstly detect propaganda text snippets from the input text, and then classify the technique of propaganda, taking advantage of semantic and argumentation features. A video demo of the PROTECT system is also provided to show its main functionalities.

Introduction
Propaganda represents an effective but often misleading communication strategy which is employed to promote a certain viewpoint, for instance in the political context <cit.>. The goal of this communication strategy is to persuade the audience about the goodness of such a viewpoint by means of misleading and/or partial arguments, which is particularly harmful for the more vulnerable public in the society (e.g., young or elder people). Therefore the ability to detect the occurrences of propaganda in political discourse and newspaper articles is of main importance, and Natural Language Processing methods and technologies play a main role in this context addressing the propaganda detection and classification task <cit.>. It is, in particular, important to make this vulnerable public aware of the problem and provide them tools able to raise their awareness and develop their critical thinking. To achieve this ambitious goal, we present in this paper a new tool called PROTECT (PROpaganda Text dEteCTion) to automatically identify and classify propaganda in texts. In the current version, only English text is processed. This tool has been designed with an easy-to-access user interface and a web-service API to ensure a wide public use of PROTECT online. To the best of our knowledge, PROTECT is the first online tool for propagandist text identification and classification with an interface allowing the user to submit his/her own text to be analysed.[The video demonstrating the PROTECT tool is available here s://1drv.ms/u/s!Ao-qMrhQAfYtkzD69JPAYY3nSFub?e=oUQbxQ>] PROTECT presents two main functionalities: i) the automatic propaganda detection and classification service, which allows the user to paste or upload a text and returns the text where the propagandist text snippets are highlighted in different colors depending on the propaganda technique which is employed, and ii) the propaganda word clouds, to show in a easy to catch visualisation the identified propagandist text snippets. PROTECT is deployed as a web-service API, allowing users to download the output (the text annotated with the identified propaganda technique) as a file. The PROTECT tool relies on a pipeline architecture to first detect the propaganda text snippets, and second to classify the propaganda text snippets with respect to a specific propaganda technique. We cast this task as a sentence-span classification problem and we address it relying on a transformer architecture. Results reach SoTA systems performances on the tasks of propaganda detection and classification (for a comparison with SoTA algorithms, we refer to <cit.>). The paper is structured as follows: first, Section <ref> discusses the state of the art in propaganda detection and classification and compares our contribution to the literature. Then Section <ref> describes the pipeline for the detection and classification of propaganda text snippets as well as the data sets used for the evaluation and the obtained results. Section <ref> describes the functionalities of the web interface, followed by the Conclusions.

Conclusion
In this paper, we presented PROTECT, a propaganda detection and classification tool. PROTECT relies on a pipeline to detect propaganda snippets from plain text. We evaluated the proposed pipeline on standard benchmarks achieving state-of-the-art results. PROTECT is deployed as a web-service API that accepts a plain text input, returning downloadable annotated text for further usage. In addition, a propaganda word clouds service allows to gain further insights from such text.