# Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Code-Switched Social Media Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [GLUECoS : An Evaluation Benchmark for Code-Switched NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12376/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02696/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Code-switched Speech and Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00784/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2021 Task 6: Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09284/) (2021)
- [Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08013/) (2021)
- [Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10057/) (2022)
- [Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12802/) (2021)
- [CALCS 2021 Shared Task: Machine Translation for Code-Switched Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09625/) (2022)
- [RUBERT: A Bilingual Roman Urdu BERT Using Cross Lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11278/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [UKElectionNarratives: A Dataset of Misleading Narratives Surrounding Recent UK General Elections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05459/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Propaganda is a form of communication intended to influence the opinions and the mindset of the public to promote a particular agenda. With the rise of social media, propaganda has spread rapidly, leading to the need for automatic propaganda detection systems. Most work on propaganda detection has focused on high-resource languages, such as English, and little effort has been made to detect propaganda for low-resource languages. Yet, it is common to find a mix of multiple languages in social media communication, a phenomenon known as code-switching. Code-switching combines different languages within the same text, which poses a challenge for automatic systems. With this in mind, here we propose the novel task of detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text. To support this task, we create a corpus of 1,030 texts code-switching between English and Roman Urdu, annotated with 20 propaganda techniques, which we make publicly available. We perform a number of experiments contrasting different experimental setups, and we find that it is important to model the multilinguality directly (rather than using translation) as well as to use the right fine-tuning strategy. The code and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/propaganda-codeswitched-text