Fralak at SemEval-2024 Task 4: combining RNN-generated hierarchy paths with simple neural nets for hierarchical multilabel text classification in a multilingual zero-shot setting

AbstractThis paper describes the submission of team fralak for subtask 1 of task 4 of the Semeval-2024 shared task: ‘Multilingual detection of persuasion techniques in memes’. The first subtask included only the textual content of the memes. We restructured the labels into strings that showed the full path through the hierarchy. The system includes an RNN module that is trained to generate these strings. This module was then incorporated in an ensemble model with 2 more models consisting of basic fully connected networks. Although our model did not perform particularly well on the English only setting, we found that it generalized better to other languages in a zero-shot context than most other models. Some additional experiments were performed to explain this. Findings suggest that the RNN generating the restructured labels generalized well across languages, but preprocessing did not seem to play a role. We conclude by giving suggestions for future improvements of our core idea.