# Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10057 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10057/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [FANG: Leveraging Social Context for Fake News Detection Using Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07939/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02696/) (2020)
- [Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00413/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Stance Detection for Mis- and Disinformation Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00242/) (2021)
- [Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic: Modeling the Perspective of Journalists, Fact-Checkers, Social Media Platforms, Policy Makers, and the Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00033/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00770/) (2018)
- [Detecting and Understanding Harmful Memes: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04274/) (2022)
- [SOLID: A Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Dataset for Offensive Language Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14454/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2021 Task 6: Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09284/) (2021)
- [A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance Detection Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05180/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Disinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12541/) (2021)
- [Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07997/) (2020)
- [Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08013/) (2021)
- [Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06002/) (2017)
- [Findings of the NLP4IF-2019 Shared Task on Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09982/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat!: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15118/) (2021)
- [Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12802/) (2021)
- [Findings of the NLP4IF-2021 Shared Tasks on Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic and Censorship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12986/) (2021)
- [The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13046/) (2021)
- [A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News About COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11372/) (2021)
- [IITD at the WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Multilingual Multi-Granularity Network for Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17190/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Can GPT-4 Identify Propaganda? Annotation and Detection of Propaganda Spans in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17478/) (2024)
- [ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Techniques and Disinformation Detection in Arabic Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03179/) (2023)
- [Toxic Memes: A Survey of Computational Perspectives on the Detection and Explanation of Meme Toxicities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07353/) (2024)
- [Native vs Non-Native Language Prompting: A Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07054/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06422/) (2023)
- [Propaganda to Hate: A Multimodal Analysis of Arabic Memes with Multi-Agent LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07246/) (2024)
- [QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection using Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03336/) (2023)
- [Legend at ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Technique Detection using a Language-Agnostic Text Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09661/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation using Transformers and Similarity Measures for Improving Arabic Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13939/) (2022)
- [Toxic language detection: a systematic review of Arabic datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07228/) (2023)
- [USTHB at NADI 2023 shared task: Exploring Preprocessing and Feature Engineering Strategies for Arabic Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10536/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Automatic Credibility Assessment Using Textual Credibility Signals in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21360/) (2024)
- [Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Code-Switched Social Media Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14534/) (2023)
- [Mavericks at ArAIEval Shared Task: Towards a Safer Digital Space -- Transformer Ensemble Models Tackling Deception and Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18730/) (2023)
- [Investigating Persuasion Techniques in Arabic: An Empirical Study Leveraging Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12884/) (2024)
- [Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16497/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained Narrative Classification in Biased News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03582/) (2025)
- [From Emotion to Expression: Theoretical Foundations and Resources for Fear Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17132/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Propaganda is the expression of an opinion or an action by an individual or a group deliberately designed to influence the opinions or the actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends, which is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda techniques are commonly used in social media to manipulate or to mislead users. Thus, there has been a lot of recent research on automatic detection of propaganda techniques in text as well as in memes. However, so far the focus has been primarily on English. With the aim to bridge this language gap, we ran a shared task on detecting propaganda techniques in Arabic tweets as part of the WANLP 2022 workshop, which included two subtasks. Subtask~1 asks to identify the set of propaganda techniques used in a tweet, which is a multilabel classification problem, while Subtask~2 asks to detect the propaganda techniques used in a tweet together with the exact span(s) of text in which each propaganda technique appears. The task attracted 63 team registrations, and eventually 14 and 3 teams made submissions for subtask 1 and 2, respectively. Finally, 11 teams submitted system description papers.