CLaC at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Language Potluck RoBERTa Detects Online Persuasion Techniques in a Multilingual Setup

Nelson Filipe Costa, Bryce Hamilton, Leila Kosseim

The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023) Task 3: detecting the category, the framing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multi-lingual setup Paper

TLDR: This paper presents our approach to the SemEval-2023 Task 3 to detect online persuasion techniques in a multilingual setup. Our classification system is based on the RoBERTa-base model trained predominantly on English to label the persuasion techniques across 9 different languages. Our system was
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Abstract: This paper presents our approach to the SemEval-2023 Task 3 to detect online persuasion techniques in a multilingual setup. Our classification system is based on the RoBERTa-base model trained predominantly on English to label the persuasion techniques across 9 different languages. Our system was able to significantly surpass the baseline performance in 3 of the 9 languages: English, Georgian and Greek. However, our wrong assumption that a single classification system trained predominantly on English could generalize well to other languages, negatively impacted our scores on the other 6 languages. In this paper, we provide a description of the reasoning behind the development of our final model and what conclusions may be drawn from its performance for future work.