The FIGNEWS Shared Task on News Media Narratives
Authors: name: Wajdi Zaghouani, name: Mustafa Jarrar, name: Nizar Habash, name: Houda Bouamor, name: Imed Zitouni, name: Mona Diab, name: Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, name: Muhammed AbuOdeh

We present an overview of the FIGNEWS shared task, organized as part of the
ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. The shared task addresses
bias and propaganda annotation in multilingual news posts. We focus on the
early days of the Israel War on Gaza as a case study. The task aims to foster
collaboration in developing annotation guidelines for subjective tasks by
creating frameworks for analyzing diverse narratives highlighting potential
bias and propaganda. In a spirit of fostering and encouraging diversity, we
address the problem from a multilingual perspective, namely within five
languages: English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi. A total of 17 teams
participated in two annotation subtasks: bias (16 teams) and propaganda (6
teams). The teams competed in four evaluation tracks: guidelines development,
annotation quality, annotation quantity, and consistency. Collectively, the
teams produced 129,800 data points. Key findings and implications for the field
are discussed.