The UrduFake@FIRE2021 shared task focused on fake news detection in the Urdu language, framed as a binary classification problem. 34 teams registered, with 18 submitting results and 11 providing technical reports, showcasing diverse approaches. The top-performing system utilized the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, achieving an F-score of 0.679.
This paper provides an overview of the UrduFake@FIRE2021 shared task, which focused on fake news detection in the Urdu language. The task involved binary classification of news articles into real or fake categories using a dataset of 1300 training and 300 testing articles across five domains. 34 teams registered, with 18 submitting results and 11 providing technical reports detailing various approaches from BoW to Transformer models, with the best system achieving an F1-macro score of 0.679.
This paper introduces two shared tasks for abusive and threatening language detection in Urdu, a low-resource language with over 170 million speakers. The tasks involve binary classification of Urdu tweets into Abusive/Non-Abusive and Threatening/Non-Threatening categories, respectively. Datasets of 2400/6000 training tweets and 1100/3950 testing tweets were created and manually annotated, along with logistic regression and BERT-based baselines. 21 teams participated and the best systems achieved F1-scores of 0.880 and 0.545 on the abusive and threatening language tasks, respectively, with m-BERT showing the best performance.
Researchers from MBZUAI have introduced UrduFactCheck, a new framework for fact-checking in Urdu, along with two datasets: UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA. The framework uses monolingual and translation-based evidence retrieval to address the lack of Urdu resources. Evaluations using twelve LLMs showed that translation-augmented methods improve performance, highlighting challenges for open-source LLMs in Urdu.
This paper introduces a new task: detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text. The authors created and released a corpus of 1,030 English-Roman Urdu code-switched texts annotated with 20 propaganda techniques. Experiments show the importance of directly modeling multilinguality and using the right fine-tuning strategy for this task.