NLPIITR at SemEval-2021 Task 6: RoBERTa Model with Data Augmentation for Persuasion Techniques Detection

AbstractThis paper describes and examines different systems to address Task 6 of SemEval-2021: Detection of Persuasion Techniques In Texts And Images, Subtask 1. The task aims to build a model for identifying rhetorical and psycho- logical techniques (such as causal oversimplification, name-calling, smear) in the textual content of a meme which is often used in a disinformation campaign to influence the users. The paper provides an extensive comparison among various machine learning systems as a solution to the task. We elaborate on the pre-processing of the text data in favor of the task and present ways to overcome the class imbalance. The results show that fine-tuning a RoBERTa model gave the best results with an F1-Micro score of 0.51 on the development set.