JUST at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detecting Propaganda Techniques using BERT Pretrained Model

Abstract

This paper presents the JUST team submission to semeval-2020 task 11, Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. Knowing that there are two subtasks in this competition, we have participated in the Technique Classification subtask (TC), which aims to identify the propaganda techniques used in specific propaganda fragments. We have used and implemented various models to detect propaganda. Our proposed model is based on BERT uncased pre-trained language model as it has achieved state-of-the-art performance on multiple NLP benchmarks. The performance result of our proposed model has scored 0.55307 F1-Score, which outperforms the baseline model provided by the organizers with 0.2519 F1-Score, and our model is 0.07 away from the best performing team. Compared to other participating systems, our submission is ranked 15th out of 31 participants.