How similar is the detection of media bias to the detection of persuasive techniques? We have explored how transferring knowledge from one task to the other may help to improve the performance. This paper presents the systems developed for participating in the SemEval-2023 Task 3: Detecting the Genre, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup. We have participated in both the subtask 1: News Genre Categorisation, and the subtask 3: Persuasion Techniques Detection. Our solutions are based on two-stage fine-tuned multilingual models. We evaluated our approach on the 9 languages provided in the task. Our results show that the use of transfer learning from media bias detection to persuasion techniques detection is beneficial for the subtask of detecting the genre (macro F1-score of 0.523 in the English test set) as it improves previous results, but not for the detection of persuasive techniques (micro F1-score of 0.24 in the English test set).

This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in sentiment analysis-related tasks, specially in polarity and intensity classification and emotion identification. SentiSense attaches emotional meanings to concepts from the WordNet lexical database, instead of terms, thus allowing to address the word ambiguity problem using one of the many WordNet-based word sense disambiguation algorithms. SentiSense consists of 5,496 words and 2,190 synsets labeled with an emotion from a set of 14 emotional categories, which are related by an antonym relationship. SentiSense has been developed semi-automatically using several semantic relations between synsets in WordNet. SentiSense is endowed with a set of tools that allow users to visualize the lexicon and some statistics about the distribution of synsets and emotions in SentiSense, as well as to easily expand the lexicon. SentiSense is available for research purposes.

This paper presents the process of development and the characteristics of an evaluation collection for a personalisation system for digital newspapers. This system selects, adapts and presents contents according to a user model that define information needs. The collection presented here contains data that are cross-related over four different axes: a set of news items from an electronic newspaper, collected into subsets corresponding to a particular sequence of days, packaged together and cross-indexed with a set of user profiles that represent the particular evolution of interests of a set of real users over the given days, expressed in each case according to four different representation frameworks: newspaper sections, Yahoo categories, keywords, and relevance feedback over the set of news items for the previous day. This information provides a minimum starting material over which one can evaluate for a given system how it addresses the first two observations - adapting to different users and adapting to particular users over time - providing that the particular system implements the representation of information needs according to the four frameworks employed in the collection. This collection has been successfully used to perform some different experiments to determine the effectiveness of the personalization system presented.