Papers › Large Language Models for Propaganda Detection

Large Language Models for Propaganda Detection

10 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.06422archive 2025-07-28

Kilian Sprenkamp, Daniel Gordon Jones, Liudmila Zavolokina

The prevalence of propaganda in our digital society poses a challenge to societal harmony and the dissemination of truth. Detecting propaganda through NLP in text is challenging due to subtle manipulation techniques and contextual dependencies. To address this issue, we investigate the effectiveness of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 for propaganda detection. We conduct experiments using the SemEval-2020 task 11 dataset, which features news articles labeled with 14 propaganda techniques as a multi-label classification problem. Five variations of GPT-3 and GPT-4 are employed, incorporating various prompt engineering and fine-tuning strategies across the different models. We evaluate the models' performance by assessing metrics such as F1 score, Precision, and Recall, comparing the results with the current state-of-the-art approach using RoBERTa. Our findings demonstrate that GPT-4 achieves comparable results to the current state-of-the-art. Further, this study analyzes the potential and challenges of LLMs in complex tasks like propaganda detection.

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ArticlesMUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATIONMulti-Label ClassificationPrompt EngineeringPropaganda detection

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3GPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionRoBERTaSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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