This paper investigates the optimization of propaganda technique detection in Arabic text, including tweets \& news paragraphs, from ArAIEval shared task 1. Our approach involves fine-tuning the AraBERT v2 model with a neural network classifier for sequence tagging. Experimental results show relying on the first token of the word for technique prediction produces the best performance. In addition, incorporating genre information as a feature further enhances the model's performance. Our system achieved a score of 25.41, placing us 4$^{th}$ on the leaderboard. Subsequent post-submission improvements further raised our score to 26.68.

Propaganda aims at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. Previous work has addressed propaganda detection at the document level, typically labelling all articles from a propagandistic news outlet as propaganda. Such noisy gold labels inevitably affect the quality of any learning system trained on them. A further issue with most existing systems is the lack of explainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel task: performing fine-grained analysis of texts by detecting all fragments that contain propaganda techniques as well as their type. In particular, we create a corpus of news articles manually annotated at the fragment level with eighteen propaganda techniques and we propose a suitable evaluation measure. We further design a novel multi-granularity neural network, and we show that it outperforms several strong BERT-based baselines.