BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge

AbstractThis paper outlines our multimodal ensemble learning system for identifying persuasion techniques in memes. We contribute an approach which utilises the novel inclusion of consistent named visual entities extracted using Google Vision’s API as an external knowledge source, joined to our multimodal ensemble via late fusion. As well as detailing our experiments in ensemble combinations, fusion methods and data augmentation, we explore the impact of including external data and summarise post-evaluation improvements to our architecture based on analysis of the task results.