NOTE: This project was developed for SemEval 2024 - Task 4, which can been explored further here
Memes are one of the most popular type of content used in an online disinformation campaign. They are mostly effective on social media platforms, since there they can easily reach a large number of users. Memes in a disinformation campaign achieve their goal of influencing the users through a number of rhetorical and psychological techniques, such as causal oversimplification, name calling, smear.
The goal of the shared task is to build models for identifying such techniques in the textual content of a meme only (one subtask) and in a multimodal setting in which both the textual and the visual content are to be analysed together (two subtasks).
Subtask 1 - Given only the “textual content” of a meme, identify which of the 20 persuasion techniques, organized in a hierarchy, it uses. If the ancestor node of a technique is selected, only a partial reward is given. This is a hierarchical multilabel classification problem.
Subtask 2a - Given a meme, identify which of the 22 persuasion techniques, organized in a hierarchy, are used both in the textual and in the visual content of the meme (multimodal task). If the ancestor node of a technique is selected, only partial reward will be given. This is a hierarchical multilabel classification problem.
Subtask 2b - Given a meme (both the textual and the visual content), identify whether it contains a persuasion technique (at least one of the 22 techniques we considered in this task), or no technique. This is a binary classification problem. Note that this is a simplified version of subtask 2a in which the hierarchy is cut at the first two children of the root node.