Robust Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Slavic Languages via Multitask Debiasing and Walking Embeddings

AbstractWe present our solution to Subtask 1 of the Shared Task on the Detection and Classification of Persuasion Techniques in Texts for Slavic Languages. Our approach integrates fine-tuned multilingual transformer models with two complementary robustness-oriented strategies: Walking Embeddings and Content-Debiasing. With the first, we tried to understand the change in embeddings when various manipulation techniques were applied. The latter leverages a supervised contrastive objective over semantically equivalent yet stylistically divergent text pairs, generated via GPT-4. We conduct extensive experiments, including 5-fold cross-validation and out-of-domain evaluation, and explore the impact of contrastive loss weighting.