arXiv Computation and Language

SWARM: A Multilingual Human-Annotated Dataset for Russian Propaganda Detection in Search Engine Results

The paper introduces SWARM, a multilingual dataset of 2,183 search engine results in nine languages, annotated for support of Russian propaganda narratives. It evaluates a source-based blocklist, supervised classifiers, and zero‑shot large language models, finding that blocklists miss most propaganda and that content‑level models vary in performance, with the best LLM achieving an F1 of 0.73. The study highlights the need for per‑language, content‑level detection of search‑borne propaganda.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations

ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.

By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Propaganda Forensics: Recovering the Generation Pipeline of an AI-Driven Influence Campaign

arXiv:2608. 15746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a forensic analysis of the generation pipeline behind a recent AI-driven influence campaign.

By Benjamin Icard, Elouan Vuichard, Louis Lefebvre, Lila Sainero, Thomas Girault, Alice Breton, Tanguy Launay, Gauvain Bourgne, Morgane Casanova, Guillaume Gadek, Victor Kl\"otzer, Michel Le Nouy, Guillaume Gravier, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Paul \'Egr\'e
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models

The study examines how language influences AI chatbot responses to questions about the war in Ukraine, revealing that the same AI systems (GPT, Claude, Gemini) produce varying political stances across 112 languages. By evaluating 20 statements in 112 languages, the researchers found that Russia‑leaning versus Ukraine‑leaning answers differ by language, mirroring global political attitudes such as public support for Russia, UN voting patterns, and aid levels. This pattern persists across all three models and even when specific statement pairs are removed, suggesting that information warfare could embed geopolitical biases into AI training data.

By Maxim Chupilkin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Zero-shot narrative detection in social messaging

The paper explores how large language models can detect hidden narratives in social messages without training data. By feeding the models human-written narrative descriptions, performance improves markedly, while automatically generated descriptions or few-shot examples can hurt accuracy. Ensemble techniques, especially majority voting, further boost robustness, and larger models show the best results with less sensitivity to prompts.

By Jes\'us M. Fraile-Hern\'andez, Anselmo Pe\~nas, Patrick Giedemann
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

MIL-BERT: Classification of Arbitrarily Large Text with Performance and Explanatory Guarantees

MIL-BERT is a neural network algorithm that classifies large texts by selecting relevant excerpts, inspired by multiple instance learning. It scales to samples with nearly 1 million tokens and has been evaluated on seven datasets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on three long‑text tasks such as political bias detection, trigger warning identification, and author demographic inference. The model also generalizes from weakly‑labeled text bags to accurately classify smaller instances.

By John Cadigan, Dayne Freitag, Eric Yeh
arXiv AI
Oct 12

UkrMeme: Multimodal Explainable Persuasion Detection in Ukrainian Memes

The paper introduces UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasive techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that retains the original visual content. The authors evaluate vision‑language models in a zero‑shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. They also compare Layer‑wise Relevance Propagation and model‑generated token attributions to analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.

By Nazar Andrushko, Vera Schmitt, Veronika Solopova
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Agentic Detection of Online Conspiracies

The paper presents an agentic framework for detecting conspiratorial content in social media by inferring the speaker’s intent rather than merely identifying explicit claims. It leverages social context and adaptive tool use, demonstrating superior performance over text-only and non-agentic models on a large Hebrew tweet dataset spanning election cycles and the COVID pandemic. The study highlights the importance of context-aware, reasoning-driven approaches for accurate conspiracy detection.

By Lior Biton, Oren Tsur
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Multilingual Models for Check-Worthy Social Media Posts Detection

The paper reports a comprehensive study of transformer-based NLP models for detecting check-worthy social media posts, covering data collection, preprocessing, architecture selection, fine‑tuning, testing, and implementation. It focuses on multilingual models that can process English and low‑resource languages such as Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and Slovak, and compares their performance to state‑of‑the‑art baselines. The work introduces multi‑label multilingual classifiers that simultaneously identify harmful content and posts containing verifiable factual claims efficiently.

By Sebastian Kula