Multilinguality in the VIGILANT project (2024)

Abstract: VIGILANT (Vital IntelliGence to Investigate ILlegAl DisiNformaTion) is a three-year Horizon Europe project that will equip European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) with advanced disinformation detection and analysis tools to investigate and prevent criminal activities linked to disinformation. These include disinformation instigating violence towards minorities, promoting false medical cures, and increasing tensions between groups causing civil unrest and violent acts. VIGILANT’s four LEAs require support for English, Spanish, Catalan, Greek, Estonian, Romanian and Russian. Therefore, multilinguality is a major challenge and we present the current status of our tools and our plans to improve their performance.

## introduction disinformation and other related forms of harmful content has an increasingly detrimental effect on society. it is used to reduce trust in healthcare @xcite , politics and rule of law @xcite , and influence voting behaviour @xcite or to increase funding and support for criminal networks. it has been classified as a strategic threat to the eu and its member states. due to its nature, disinformation is extremely difficult for leas to identify, investigate and link to criminal activities. the internet and social media platforms, where anonymity amplifies conspiracy, have provided ideal conditions for it to grow. one of the key challenges for vigilant is how to provide tools for multiple leas in different countries and targetting different languages. the consortium includes leas from greece, spain, estonia and moldova. therefore, as a minimum, the vigilant platform (and its tools) should support: english (en), spanish (es), catalan (ca), romanian (ro), russian (ru), greek (el) and estonian (et). a community of early adopters (coea), which currently has members from ireland, spain and portugal, has been set up for leas who are not in the consortium but who wish to adopt vig-ilant. the project aims to provide support for all current and future coea required languages to create a common european platform to investigate disinformation linked to criminal activities. ## multilingual approaches in vigilant to date, most work in disinformation analysis has been done for english. developing monolingual approaches for each language from scratch is not feasible, given our project's time-frame and the need for large amounts of data for training stateof-the-art models. approaches that leverage the knowledge learnt in models developed for the english language are thus needed. language adaptation in vigilant is a challenge for (i) natural language processing (nlp) and information retrieval (ir) tools; (ii) user interface and documentation; and (iii) training materials. we focus on (i), since (ii) and (iii) will be done by lea professionals. multiple tools are being adapted for vigilant and here we discuss the challenges for multilingual support and our planned approaches. we will explore multiple approaches for multilingual adaptation: ## project timeline and future work vigilant is 16 months into its 36 month lifespan. in the 1 st year of the project, we focused on analysing the tools to be deployed, further developing and adapting their apis and on developing new tools for image/video and network analysis. we are releasing a minimum viable prototype in 2024 that will integrate nlp and ir tools, supporting en only. we expect to develop new approaches adapted to multilingual settings in the next 12 months.