Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes
Item
Title
Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes
arXiv:2109.08013 [cs]
Creator
Dimitar Dimitrov
Bishr Bin Ali
Shaden Shaar
Firoj Alam
Fabrizio Silvestri
Hamed Firooz
Preslav Nakov
Giovanni Da San Martino
Subject
68T50
Computer Science - Computation and Language
Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Science - Machine Learning
Computer Science - Multimedia
I.2.7
Abstract
Propaganda can be defined as a form of communication that aims to influence the opinions or the actions of people towards a specific goal; this is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda, in the form we know it today, can be dated back to the beginning of the 17th century. However, it is with the advent of the Internet and the social media that it has started to spread on a much larger scale than before, thus becoming major societal and political issue. Nowadays, a large fraction of propaganda in social media is multimodal, mixing textual with visual content. With this in mind, here we propose a new multi-label multimodal task: detecting the type of propaganda techniques used in memes. We further create and release a new corpus of 950 memes, carefully annotated with 22 propaganda techniques, which can appear in the text, in the image, or in both. Our analysis of the corpus shows that understanding both modalities together is essential for detecting these techniques. This is further confirmed in our experiments with several state-of-the-art multimodal models.
Date
2021-08-07