The topic of automatic detection of manipulation and propaganda in the media is not a novel issue; however, it remains an urgent concern that necessitates continuous research focus. The topic is studied within the framework of various papers, competitions and shared tasks, which provide different techniques definitions and include the analysis of text data, images, as well as multi-lingual sources. In this study, we propose a novel multi-level classification scheme for identifying propaganda techniques. We introduce a new Russian dataset ZenPropaganda consisting of coronavirus-related texts collected from Vkontakte and Yandex.Zen platforms, which have been expertly annotated with fine-grained labeling of manipulative spans. We further conduct a comprehensive analysis by comparing our dataset with existing related ones and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art approaches that have been proposed for them. Furthermore, we provide a detailed discussion of our findings, which can serve as a valuable resource for future research in this field.

Large Language Models (LLM) often produce text with incorrect facts and hallucinations. To address this issue, we developed a fact-checking system Truth-O-Meter12 which verifies LLM results on the Internet and other sources of information to detect wrong claims/facts and proposes corrections for them. NLP and reasoning techniques such as Abstract Meaning Representation and syntactic alignment are applied to match hallucinating sentences with truthful ones. To handle inconsistent sources while fact-checking, we rely on argumentation analysis in the form of defeasible logic programming, selecting the most authoritative source. Our evaluation shows that LLM content can be substantially improved for factual correctness and meaningfulness on an industrial scale.

Anton Chernyavskiy, Dmitry Ilvovsky, Pavel Kalinin, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

The rise of Internet has made it a major source of information. Unfortunately, not all information online is true, and thus a number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched, both manual and automatic, to deal with the problem. Here, we present our contribution in this regard: WhatTheWikiFact, a system for automatic claim verification using Wikipedia. The system can predict the veracity of an input claim, and it further shows the evidence it has retrieved as part of the verification process. It shows confidence scores and a list of relevant Wikipedia articles, together with detailed information about each article, including the phrase used to retrieve it, the most relevant sentences extracted from it and their stance with respect to the input claim, as well as the associated probabilities. The system supports several languages: Bulgarian, English, and Russian.