SheffieldVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Mono and Multilingual Approaches for News Genre, Topic and Persuasion Technique Classification

AbstractThis paper describes our approach for SemEval- 2023 Task 3: Detecting the category, the fram- ing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multilingual setup. For Subtask 1 (News Genre), we propose an ensemble of fully trained and adapter mBERT models which was ranked joint-first for German, and had the high- est mean rank of multi-language teams. For Subtask 2 (Framing), we achieved first place in 3 languages, and the best average rank across all the languages, by using two separate ensem- bles: a monolingual RoBERTa-MUPPETLARGE and an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTaLARGE with adapters and task adaptive pretraining. For Sub- task 3 (Persuasion Techniques), we trained a monolingual RoBERTa-Base model for English and a multilingual mBERT model for the re- maining languages, which achieved top 10 for all languages, including 2nd for English. For each subtask, we compared monolingual and multilingual approaches, and considered class imbalance techniques.