# SemEval-2021 Task 6: Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [FastBERT: a Self-distilling BERT with Adaptive Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02178/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [Supervised Multimodal Bitransformers for Classifying Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02950/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02696/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05972/) (2017)
- [RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06683/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07997/) (2020)
- [Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 1: Check-Worthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05542/) (2018)
- [Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06613/) (2018)
- [Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06002/) (2017)
- [CheckThat! at CLEF 2020: Enabling the Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08546/) (2020)
- [Findings of the NLP4IF-2019 Shared Task on Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09982/) (2019)
- [Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05854/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 8: Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01727/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Multimodal Digital Deception Detection and Disinformation Spread across Social Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05838/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05184/) (2021)
- [Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00413/) (2021)
- [Detecting and Understanding Harmful Memes: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04274/) (2022)
- [Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08013/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Classification Evaluation Metrics and a Critical Reflection of Common Evaluation Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16958/) (2024)
- [Overview of the CLEF--2021 CheckThat! Lab on Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12987/) (2021)
- [Can GPT-4 Identify Propaganda? Annotation and Detection of Propaganda Spans in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17478/) (2024)
- [LLM-Generated Black-box Explanations Can Be Adversarially Helpful](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06800/) (2024)
- [ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Techniques and Disinformation Detection in Arabic Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03179/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Propaganda Span Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09812/) (2023)
- [Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10057/) (2022)
- [The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14828/) (2025)
- [Must Read: A Comprehensive Survey of Computational Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07775/) (2025)
- [Are Vision-Language Models Safe in the Wild? A Meme-Based Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15389/) (2025)
- [ArAIEval Shared Task: Propagandistic Techniques Detection in Unimodal and Multimodal Arabic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04247/) (2024)
- [The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13046/) (2021)
- [MemeIntel: Explainable Detection of Propagandistic and Hateful Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16612/) (2025)
- [Comparison between parameter-efficient techniques and full fine-tuning: A case study on multilingual news article classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07282/) (2023)
- [A Template Is All You Meme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06649/) (2023)
- [Propaganda to Hate: A Multimodal Analysis of Arabic Memes with Multi-Agent LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07246/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Cognitive Compass: Theory-of-Mind-Guided Multimodal Emotion Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00971/) (2026)
- [PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08855/) (2022)
- [Bag of Tricks for Multimodal AutoML with Image, Text, and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16243/) (2024)
- [Using Persuasive Writing Strategies to Explain and Detect Health Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05985/) (2022)
- [MemeLens: Multilingual Multitask VLMs for Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12539/) (2026)
- [BLUE at Memotion 2.0 2022: You have my Image, my Text and my Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07543/) (2022)
- [SheffieldVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Mono and multilingual approaches for news genre, topic and persuasion technique classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09421/) (2023)
- [QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection using Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03336/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Persuasion Detection: Video Games as an Invaluable Data Source for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04453/) (2022)
- [KInITVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Simple yet Powerful Multilingual Fine-Tuning for Persuasion Techniques Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11924/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We describe SemEval-2021 task 6 on Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and Images: the data, the annotation guidelines, the evaluation setup, the results, and the participating systems. The task focused on memes and had three subtasks: (i) detecting the techniques in the text, (ii) detecting the text spans where the techniques are used, and (iii) detecting techniques in the entire meme, i.e., both in the text and in the image. It was a popular task, attracting 71 registrations, and 22 teams that eventually made an official submission on the test set. The evaluation results for the third subtask confirmed the importance of both modalities, the text and the image. Moreover, some teams reported benefits when not just combining the two modalities, e.g., by using early or late fusion, but rather modeling the interaction between them in a joint model.