YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2021 Task 6: Combining ALBERT and Text-CNN for Persuasion Detection in Texts and Images

Abstract: In recent years, memes combining image and text have been widely used in social media, and memes are one of the most popular types of content used in online disinformation campaigns. In this paper, our study on the detection of persuasion techniques in texts and images in SemEval-2021 Task 6 is summarized. For propaganda technology detection in text, we propose a combination model of both ALBERT and Text CNN for text classification, as well as a BERT-based multi-task sequence labeling model for propaganda technology coverage span detection. For the meme classification task involved in text understanding and visual feature extraction, we designed a parallel channel model divided into text and image channels. Our method achieved a good performance on subtasks 1 and 3. The micro F1-scores of 0.492, 0.091, and 0.446 achieved on the test sets of the three subtasks ranked 12th, 7th, and 11th, respectively, and all are higher than the baseline model.