# KInITVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Simple yet Powerful Multilingual Fine-Tuning for Persuasion Techniques Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11924 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11924/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04884/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Few-sample BERT Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05987/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02696/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2021 Task 6: Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09284/) (2021)
- [Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05854/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Comparison between parameter-efficient techniques and full fine-tuning: A case study on multilingual news article classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07282/) (2023)
- [Legend at ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Technique Detection using a Language-Agnostic Text Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09661/) (2023)
- [Detecting Winning Arguments with Large Language Models and Persuasion Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10660/) (2026)
- [Towards Detecting Persuasion on Social Media: From Model Development to Insights on Persuasion Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13844/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents the best-performing solution to the SemEval 2023 Task 3 on the subtask 3 dedicated to persuasion techniques detection. Due to a high multilingual character of the input data and a large number of 23 predicted labels (causing a lack of labelled data for some language-label combinations), we opted for fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based language models. Conducting multiple experiments, we find the best configuration, which consists of large multilingual model (XLM-RoBERTa large) trained jointly on all input data, with carefully calibrated confidence thresholds for seen and surprise languages separately. Our final system performed the best on 6 out of 9 languages (including two surprise languages) and achieved highly competitive results on the remaining three languages.