Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

In this paper, we present our approach to the task of identification of persuasion techniques in text, which is a subtask of the SemEval-2023 Task 3 on the multilingual detection of genre, framing, and persuasion techniques in online news. The subtask is multi-label at the paragraph level and the inventory considered by the organizers covers 23 persuasion techniques. Our solution is based on an ensemble of a variety of pre-trained language models (PLMs) fine-tuned on the propaganda dataset. We first describe our system, the different experimental setups we considered, and then provide the results on the dev and test sets released by the organizers. The official evaluation shows our solution ranks 1st in English and attains high scores in all the other languages, i.e. French, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian. We also perform an extensive analysis of the data and the annotations to investigate how they can influence the quality of our systems.