NLUBot101 at SemEval-2023 Task 3: An Augmented Multilingual NLI Approach Towards Online News Persuasion Techniques Detection

We describe our submission to SemEval 2023 Task 3, specifically the subtask on persuasion technique detection. In this work, our team NLUBot101 tackled a novel task of classifying persuasion techniques in online news articles at a paragraph level. The low-resource multilingual datasets, along with the imbalanced label distribution, make this task challenging. Our team presented a cross-lingual data augmentation approach and leveraged a recently proposed multilingual natural language inference model to address these challenges. Our solution achieves the highest macro-F1 score for the English task, and top 5 micro-F1 scores on both the English and Russian leaderboards.