=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-3740/paper-248 |storemode=property |title=Small Language Models and Large Language Models in Oppositional thinking analysis: Capabilities, Biases and Challenges |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3740/paper-248.pdf |volume=Vol-3740 |authors=Álvaro Huertas-García,Carlos Martí-González,Javier Muñoz,Enrique De Miguel Ambite |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clef/Huertas-GarciaM24 }} ==Small Language Models and Large Language Models in Oppositional thinking analysis: Capabilities, Biases and Challenges== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3740/paper-248.pdf
                         Small Language Models and Large Language Models in
                         Oppositional Thinking Analysis: Capabilities, Biases and
                         Challenges
                         Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2024

                         Álvaro Huertas-García1,2 , Carlos Martí-González2 , Javier Muñoz2 and
                         Enrique De Miguel Ambite2
                         1
                             Department of Computer System Engineering, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Calle de Alan Turing, 28031, Madrid, Spain
                         2
                             Fundación Tecnológica Advantx – Funditec, Paseo de la Castellana, 28046 , Madrid, Spain


                                        Abstract
                                        The proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories needs robust methods to differentiate legitimate
                                        critical discourse from harmful conspiratorial narratives. This study investigates discerning critical messages
                                        from conspiracy theories within COVID-19 discussions on Telegram. Preserving information integrity on social
                                        media impacts vital public discourse on health, politics, and science.
                                             The research employs two distinct approaches: linguistic style classification and contextual knowledge clas-
                                        sification. The former leverages a diverse ensemble of Small Language Models (SLMs), Large Language Models
                                        (LLMs), and State-Space Models (SSMs), while the latter harnesses the capabilities of the Claude 2.0 Opus model
                                        for contextual analysis.
                                             Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the SLM models using Matryoshka embedding and Mamba (SSM)
                                        models exhibit superior performance for the English language dataset, achieving a Matthews Correlation Co-
                                        efficient (MCC) of 0.793. For the Spanish dataset, the Spanish BERT baseline (SLM) attains an MCC of 0.699.
                                        Notably, a multilingual model trained on a balanced combination of English and Spanish data outperforms its
                                        monolingual counterparts, with the multilingual-e5-large model (LLM) achieving an MCC of 0.768 for English
                                        and 0.725 for Spanish. This finding underscores the potential of multilingual models to mitigate the ”curse of
                                        multilinguality,” where performance often degrades on low-resource languages. However, the suboptimal per-
                                        formance of the Claude 2.0 Opus model, exhibiting a tendency to classify texts as conspiracy-related, highlights
                                        inherent biases that require further investigation.
                                             Overall, this study contributes to the development of advanced models that can effectively differentiate crit-
                                        ical thinking from conspiratorial narratives in various linguistic contexts. Future research should prioritize
                                        identifying and addressing biases in large language models to ensure fair treatment of diverse perspectives, as
                                        well as to preserve freedom of expression and ensure fair representation of narratives.

                                        Keywords
                                        PAN 2024, Oppositional Thinking Analysis, Transformers, Mamba, LLM, Claude, Bias




                         1. Introduction
                         The proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories has become a significant challenge in
                         today’s digital age, impacting vital aspects of public discourse such as health, politics, and scientific
                         discourse [1]. Conspiracy beliefs can shape human behaviour and decision-making processes, mak-
                         ing understanding the cognitive styles and personality traits associated with such beliefs is crucial.
                         Extensive psychological research has identified numerous predictors of conspiracy beliefs, including
                         personality factors like low agreeableness and high openness to experience [1]. Moreover, studies on
                         cognitive styles have revealed a correlation between belief in conspiracy theories and lower analytic
                         thinking coupled with higher intuitive thinking [2].


                          CLEF 2024: Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, September 09–12, 2024, Grenoble, France
                          £ ahuertas@funditec.es (Á. Huertas-García)
                          ç https://github.com/Huertas97 (Á. Huertas-García)
                          Ȉ 0000-0003-2165-0144 (Á. Huertas-García); 0009-0003-1387-1630 (C. Martí-González); 0000-0001-5068-3303 (J. Muñoz);
                          0009-0008-1026-2537 (E. D. M. Ambite)
                                     © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).


CEUR
                  ceur-ws.org
Workshop      ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
   Understanding these human aspects of conspiracy beliefs is not merely an academic exercise; it
has far-reaching implications. This knowledge can inform behavioural interventions to mitigate the
spread of misinformation [3]. Furthermore, integrating cognitive and personality factors into natural
language processing (NLP) models can enhance their accuracy in distinguishing between critical and
conspiratorial narratives, ultimately improving their performance and reliability.
   In the realm of automatic content moderation, the challenge of distinguishing between conspiracy
theories and critical thinking in NLP models has emerged as a vital area of study. The prevalence of
conspiratorial content has escalated the need for robust methodologies that can accurately differentiate
between legitimate critical discourse and harmful conspiracy narratives. Maintaining the integrity of
information shared across social media platforms and other digital forums is crucial for preserving the
credibility of public discourse.


2. Background
While the focus on this topic remains relatively limited, related studies provide valuable insights
into methodologies and applications in adjacent areas. For instance, a significant contribution by [4]
presents a framework for detecting conspiracy theories on Twitter using a novel recurrent model called
BORJIS, highlighting the efficacy and challenges of NLP techniques in identifying that conspiratorial
content is often found within vast amounts of social media data. Similarly, [5] explored fake news
detection related to COVID-19 and 5G conspiracy theories using BERT embeddings and Graph Neural
Networks, showcasing advanced NLP techniques for distinguishing misinformation from legitimate
critical analysis.
   Other studies follow a different approach focusing on tracking the spread across social networks,
such as the FacTeR-Check semi-automated fact-checking tool that uses semantic similarity and natural
language inference (NLI) to monitor the evolution of misinformation or disinformation on online social
networks [3]. Additionally, the use of camouflage for content evasion has also been reported, and works
have developed multilingual NER NLP models to counter these strategies, like the ”pyleetspeak” tool
for simulating word camouflage and a NER Transformer model for its detection [6].
   Furthermore, the research conducted by [7] explores the potential of NLP techniques in fostering
critical thinking skills within educational settings. It offers valuable insights into the systematic in-
struction and assessment of critical thinking, specifically in comparison to conspiratorial thinking. Fi-
nally, [8] emphasize the importance of explicit theorization in developing models that can accurately
differentiate between critical and conspiratorial thinking in their paper on gender bias in NLP research.
   While significant progress has been made in the field, there is still much to explore in analyzing
oppositional thinking using NLP. This research article addresses this issue in both English and Spanish,
contributing to the development of more sophisticated NLP systems for real-world scenarios.

2.1. Competition Description
The competition, titled “Oppositional Thinking Analysis: Conspiracy vs Critical Narratives” is part of
the PAN at CLEF 2024 event [9, 10]. Our focus is on the first subtask, which involves analyzing texts
from the Telegram platform related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective is to perform a binary
classification to differentiate between two types of narratives:
    • Critical comment: Messages that question major decisions in the public health domain without
      promoting a conspiracist mentality. These are critical opinions based on information that may
      not be commonly accepted but do not imply secret plots or malevolent intentions.
    • Conspiracy comment: Messages that portray the pandemic or public health decisions as results
      of malevolent conspiracies by secret, influential groups. These messages often encourage distrust
      based on unverified or poorly explained evidence.
   The official evaluation metric for this subtask is the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). MCC
is a measure of the quality of binary classifications, providing a balanced evaluation even when the
                                              Language        English      Spanish

                        5000



          Text Length   4000



                        3000



                        2000



                        1000



                          0

                                        CONSPIRACY                               CRITICAL

                                                           Category

Figure 1: Distribution of Text Length in Training Set by Category and Language


classes are of very different sizes. It is normalized, making it applicable to other datasets and ensuring
robust performance assessment across diverse scenarios.


3. Methodology
Our methodology is based on two main approaches: one that classifies texts according to their linguistic
style and content, which we refer to as the Linguistic Style Classification Approach; and another
that uses the input text, combined with contextual knowledge and reasoning from large language
models (LLMs), referred to as the Contextual Knowledge Classification Approach.

3.1. Linguistic Style Classification Approach
3.1.1. Dataset Preprocessing
The dataset comprises texts in both English and Spanish, categorized into CRITICAL and CONSPIRACY
narratives. The English dataset consists of 2,621 CRITICAL texts and 1,379 CONSPIRACY texts. The
Spanish dataset includes 2,538 CRITICAL texts and 1,462 CONSPIRACY texts. Both datasets were
divided into training (80%) and validation (20%) sets using a random seed of 42.
  The preprocessing involved analyzing the prevalence of URLs, emojis, and text length distributions.
URLs were removed to standardize the text data. The text length distributions for the English dataset
were found to be 743±740 characters for CONSPIRACY and 476±479 characters for CRITICAL. For the
Spanish dataset, the distributions were 1112±946 characters for CONSPIRACY and 641±577 characters
for CRITICAL. These distributions are illustrated in Figure 1.

3.1.2. Models
We employed a diverse range of models, both monolingual and multilingual. Except for Mamba, all
models are based on the Transformer architecture. The significance of Transformer models lies in their
attention mechanism, which allows them to efficiently handle dependencies in long sequences and cap-
ture intricate patterns within the data. According to Vaswani et al.[11], the self-attention mechanism
of Transformers enables them to dynamically weigh the importance of different tokens in a sequence,
making them highly effective for various NLP tasks. Mamba, in contrast, is an advanced state-space
model (SSM) designed for efficient handling of complex sequences with large datasets, as detailed by
Gu and Dao[12].
  Below, we list the models used in our research along with brief descriptions:
  Monolingual
     • BERT-base-uncased[13]: A foundational model that effectively applies Transformers at scale,
       expanding our understanding of linguistic context. We selected the largest variant to ensure a
       comprehensive analysis and to compare historical model design evolution.
     • DistilBERT1 : A compact version of BERT by Hugging Face, offering a smaller and faster alter-
       native while maintaining similar performance. Suitable for various NLP tasks.
     • Nomic: Nomic Embed [14] innovates in embedding techniques to provide dynamic, context-
       aware representations, surpassing leading models as of February 2024. With a compact size, low
       memory usage, and advanced training methods, Nomic Embed efficiently processes up to 8192
       tokens, making it ideal for analyzing extensive online materials.
     • DistilRoBERTa[15]: A faster and smaller version of RoBERTa, trained on the same corpus in a
       self-supervised manner using BERT as a teacher.
     • twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest[16]: A RoBERTa-base model fine-tuned for sentiment
       analysis using tweets from January 2018 to December 2021, benchmarked with TweetEval.
     • all-MiniLM-L6-v22 : A Transformer model trained with contrastive loss on 1B sentence pairs
       to encode sentences and short paragraphs into a dense vector space of 384 dimensions, suitable
       for tasks like clustering or semantic search.
     • mxbai-embed-large-v1[17]: A powerful English embedding model known for its efficient size
       and high performance. Using Matryoshka Embedding [18], it trains hidden layers to generate
       high-quality embeddings independently of higher layers, reducing both the number of layers and
       embedding dimensions. Ranked in the top 25 on the MTEB leaderboard3 for sentence embedding
       tasks, it outperforms commercial models like OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-large, making it a top
       choice for our research.
     • Mamba4 [12]: An advanced state-space model designed for efficient handling of complex se-
       quences with large datasets. It uses a selection mechanism to decide whether to propagate or
       discard information based on token relevance, providing a viable method for assessing intricate
       controversial and critical comments on social media.
     • dccuchile/bert-base-spanish-wwm-uncased [19]: Also known as BETO, this is a BERT model
       trained on a large Spanish corpus using a vocabulary of about 31k BPE subwords constructed
       with SentencePiece.
    Multilingual
     • XLM-RoBERTa: A scaled cross-lingual multilingual sentence encoder version of the RoBERTa
       model, trained on 2.5TB of data across 100 languages filtered from Common Crawl.
     • LLAMA 2: A family of pre-trained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) by Meta AI,
       useful for various research and commercial purposes.
     • multilingual-e5: Developed at Microsoft, this sophisticated embedding model excels in tasks
       requiring robust text representation, such as information retrieval, semantic textual similarity,
       and text reranking. Initialized from xlm-roberta-large, it is continually trained on a mixture of
       multilingual datasets, supporting 100 languages from xlm-roberta with potential performance
       degradation for low-resource languages.
   In this style-based strategy, all these models are employed as the encoder body of the texts to which
a layer of 1024 classifier neurons is added.
1
  https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased
2
  https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
3
  https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard
4
  https://huggingface.co/state-spaces/mamba-370m-hf
Table 1
Hyperparameters Explored in Bayesian Optimization
             Parameter                                   Range/Values                              Distribution/Method
              Epochs                                           1 to 4                                     Uniform
        Accumulation Steps                                  [1, 2, 3, 4]                                  Discrete
         Learning Rate (lr)                                1e-6 to 1e-4                                 Log-Uniform
           Weight Decay                                      0.0 to 1.0                                   Uniform
             Batch Size                                         [4]                                       Discrete
           Loss Function                     [BCEWithLogitsLoss, sigmoid_focal_loss]                      Discrete
     Sigmoid Focal Loss Alpha                               0.25 to 1.0                                   Uniform
    Sigmoid Focal Loss Gamma                                 1.0 to 4.0                                   Uniform
          Scheduler Name        [PolynomialLR, CosineAnnealingWarmRestarts, LinearLR ConstantLR]          Discrete
             Optimizer                                  [AdamW, Adam]                                     Discrete



3.1.3. Hyperparameter Tuning, Importance, and Correlation
For hyperparameter tuning, we used Bayesian optimization, which leverages prior evaluations to guide
its search process, enhancing model performance. Table 1 lists the explored hyperparameters, includ-
ing their ranges and sampling distributions.
   We analyzed the importance and correlation of hyperparameters with the Matthews Correlation
Coefficient (MCC). Correlation measures the linear relationship between hyperparameters and MCC,
indicating how changes in hyperparameters affect performance.
   Additionally, we calculated an importance metric exploiting the feature importance of a random
forest model, based on the idea that the more important features appear more often in the trees of
the forest. Hyperparameters served as input features, with MCC as the target output. This provided
feature importance values, showing each hyperparameter’s contribution to predicting performance.
These analyses offer insights into how hyperparameters influence model performance.
   The experimental tracking can be consulted in Weight and Biases5

3.2. Contextual Knowledge Classification Approach
For this approach, we utilized the Claude 2.0 Opus model for zero-shot classification. This approach
relies on prompt engineering using tempeareture equals to 1 and without fine-tuning the model, lever-
aging the extensive knowledge of language and context up to early 2023. Additionally, its multilingual
capability is well-suited to this task, as approximately 10% of the data used was non-English, according
to Anthropic. This model was accessed via Anthropic’s public API before May 6.
   Below is the final prompt used for the Zero-shot classification:

       Claude 2.0 Opus Prompt

      Your role is to analyze text inputs to identify whether they represent critical commentary or
      conspiracy theories, each with distinct characteristics:
      Critical Commentary:
      Definition: Critical messages that question major decisions in the public health domain, but do
      not promote a conspiracist mentality. It is an opinion, it may not be correct but do not consider
      that the revendication belongs to a secret or a plot against the population in terms of influential
      groups. It can be a critic based on information that may not be the common opinion, and it
      could be wrong, but it is expressing a point of view that another can criticize.
      Characteristics: Applicability: Applies even when the topic might be susceptible to conspira-
      torial interpretations.
      Conspiracy Commentary:
      Definition: Messages that view the pandemic or public health decisions as a result of a malev-


5
    https://wandb.ai/huertas_97/PAN_2024_Opposing/workspace
   olent conspiracy by secret, influential groups. It can be an opinion but the main problem is that
   it tries to convince you to distrust based on evidences that are not well trusted or explained and
   leave open the door to be distrustful instead of being critical based on information that may not
   be the common opinion.
   Characteristics:

        • Suspicion and Paranoia: Thrives on distrust of official narratives and institutions.
        • Simplistic Explanations: Oversimplifies complexities by attributing them to the actions
          of a few.
        • Resistance to Evidence: Dismisses contrary evidence as part of the cover-up.

   You are required to utilize web browser research extensively to verify claims and gather context
   before making your classification. Be sure to adhere strictly to the output format, especially in
   reporting URLs used in your research to ensure transparency and accountability.
   Additional Instruction:

        • Always use a web browser to search for information related to the text. Your classification
          should be informed by credible online sources. Include URLs of these sources in your
          explanation to validate your findings and reasoning.
        • Maintain neutrality in your classification process. Do not classify a text as ”CONSPIR-
          ACY” solely because the topic is related to commonly misunderstood or hot-button issues.
          Instead, use clear evidence from the text and supporting information from web searches
          to distinguish between critical perspectives and actual conspiracy theories. Include URLs
          of these sources in your explanation to validate your findings and reasoning.

   Task Requirements:

        • Classify the narrative of the text based on the categories above.
        • Determine the main topics of the text in 2-3 words.
        • Assign a Confidence Score from 0 to 1, indicating the certainty of your classification.
        • Your explanation must reflect how the information sourced online influenced your classi-
          fication and must include URLs for verification.

   Output Format: (It is crucial that the output strictly follows this format)

   {
       "Prediction": "CATEGORY_NAME",
       "Confidence": [Confidence Score],
       "Topic": ["topic1", "topic2"],
       "Reason": "A concise explanation based on the
                 characteristics with URLs of the sources used."
   }

   It is crucial that the output strictly follows this format.


4. Experiments and Results
4.1. Training and Developing Results
This section presents the results obtained from developing and evaluating various models. As shown
in Table 2, the best monolingual model for English are mxbai-embed-large-v1 and Mamba 370m model,
achieving an MCC of 0.793, while the best model for Spanish is bert-base-spanish-wwm-uncased, with
an MCC of 0.699.
Table 2
Model performance metrics on validation set for English
                 Language    Model                                   Accuracy   F1-macro   MCC
                             mamba-370m                               0.908      0.861     0.793
                             mxbai-embed-large-v1                     0.906      0.865     0.793
                             Baseline (BERT)                          0.905      0.854     0.787
                             twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest    0.900      0.851     0.776
                             DistilRoBERTa                            0.896      0.856     0.776
                 EN
                             all-MiniLM-L6-v2_EN                      0.896      0.851     0.771
                             DistilBERT                               0.889      0.829     0.750
                             XLM-Roberta                              0.869      0.826     0.729
                             nomic-embed-text-v1.5                    0.870      0.782     0.710
                             LLAMA 2                                  0.803      0.730     0.578
                             Claude 2.0 Opus                          0.457      0.366     0.236


Table 3
Model performance metrics on validation set for Spanish
                 Language     Model                                  Accuracy   F1-macro   MCC
                              bert-base-spanish-wwm-uncased           0.863      0.793     0.699
                              multilingual-e5-large                   0.861      0.785     0.698
                              mamba-370m                              0.843      0.770     0.654
                 ES
                              nomic-embed-text-v1.5                   0.838      0.763     0.643
                              XLM-Roberta                             0.829      0.732     0.624
                              LLAMA 2                                 0.705      0.658     0.424


   As shown in Table 2, the superior performance of the mxbai-embed-large-v1 model underscores
its effectiveness in encoding texts into embeddings. This model employs the Matryoshka Embedding
technique [18], where each layer is trained to produce high-quality embeddings independently, thus
enhancing the model’s overall performance. This approach contrasts sharply with the performance of
larger models such as Llama 2 [20], which, despite having over 7 billion parameters, underperforms
when a classifier head is added. This observation corroborates the notion that model size does not
necessarily correlate with task-specific performance. Optimizing the model architecture to improve
linguistic encoding, as demonstrated by mxbai-embed-large-v1, proves more beneficial than merely
increasing the number of parameters.
   Additionally, the performance of the Mamba 370m model, which matches mxbai-embed-large-v1
with an MCC of 0.793, highlights the potential of alternative architectures beyond Transformers. The
Mamba model, with its state-space approach and selective propagation mechanism, presents a com-
pelling case for further exploration of non-Transformer architectures in NLP tasks.
   The horrible performance of the large language model Claude 2.0 Opus6 in English, which is typ-
ically a benchmark model for complex reasoning tasks, warrants further investigation. Despite its
state-of-the-art status in reasoning datasets, Claude 2.0 Opus showed a tendency to classify texts as
conspiracy-related. This bias was evident even when the model provided reasoning for its classifica-
tions, suggesting a predisposition influenced by the sensitive nature of the subject matter. This finding
highlights the need for ongoing research into model biases and their impact on classification tasks,
particularly for topics with significant socio-cultural implications such as conspiracy theories.
   In the Spanish dataset (see Table 3, the bert-base-spanish-wwm-uncased model achieved lower per-
formance compared to its English counterparts, indicating potential limitations in the Spanish training
data or model architecture. However, when using the multilingual model multilingual-e5-large, which
was trained on Spanish data alone, still not surpassing the monolingual model. This suggests that

6
    https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-2
Table 4
Model performance metrics on validation set for English and Spanish
                                                    EN Score                          ES Score
    Language    Model
                                         Accuracy     F1-macro     MCC     Accuracy    F1-macro   MCC
                multilingual-e5-large      0.896        0.845      0.768    0.874        0.821    0.725
    EN-ES
                multilingual-e5-base       0.895        0.850      0.769    0.868        0.819    0.714


in this context, monolingual models might be more effective than multilingual ones just using one
language data for training.
   Interestingly, when the multilingual model was trained on both English and Spanish datasets, it
achieved an MCC of 0.725, as shown in Table 4. This indicates that multilingual models can leverage
larger and more diverse datasets to enhance their understanding of the task. The ability of multilin-
gual models to generalize across languages is particularly evident when they are exposed to substantial
amounts of well-represented data, demonstrating their potential to exploit linguistic diversity for im-
proved performance.
   Overall, we select the following models for the two trial of the competition:

    • RUN 1 - Monolingual approach consists of Mamba 370m model for English and bert-base-spanish-
      wwm-uncased model for Spanish.
    • RUN 2 - Multilingual approach consists of multilingual model multilingual-e5-large, trained in
      both languages together.

4.2. Parameters Tuning, Importance and Correlation
The results of our hyperparameter tuning highlight the significant influence of learning rate (lr) on
 model performance, with an importance score of 0.531 and a negative correlation of -0.535 with MCC.
This suggests that optimizing the learning rate is crucial for achieving higher performance, as inap-
 propriate values can lead to suboptimal results. Runtime also showed considerable importance (0.196)
 and a positive correlation (0.410), indicating that longer training times generally improve model per-
 formance.
    Weight decay and sigmoid focal loss parameters, while less influential than the learning rate, still
 play vital roles. The weight decay parameter had an importance of 0.163 and a negative correlation of
-0.323, suggesting that higher weight decay might adversely affect the model. Sigmoid focal loss [21]
 parameters (alpha and gamma) demonstrated moderate importance, with alpha showing a positive
 correlation (0.156) and gamma a negative one (-0.325). The focal loss function, designed to address
 class imbalance, is given by:

                                      FL(𝑝𝑡 ) = −𝛼𝑡 (1 − 𝑝𝑡 )𝛾 log(𝑝𝑡 )
   where 𝑝𝑡 is the model’s estimated probability for the true class label, 𝛼𝑡 is a weighting factor for
class imbalance, and 𝛾 is a focusing parameter that adjusts the rate at which easy examples are down-
weighted. This indicates a complex relationship where these parameters can be fine-tuned to balance
the model’s sensitivity to class imbalances effectively.
   Other parameters, such as epochs, batch size, and accumulation steps, showed lower importance
scores. Interestingly, batch size had a positive correlation with MCC (0.287), indicating that larger
batch sizes might contribute to better performance. However, the relatively low importance scores
for these parameters suggest that while they do influence performance, their impact is less critical
compared to the learning rate and regularization parameters.
                                                  Parameter Importance and Correlation with MCC performance
                                   lr


                             Runtime


                       weight_decay


             sigmoid_focal_loss_alpha
Parameter




            sigmoid_focal_loss_gamma


                              epochs


                          batch_size


                  accumulation_steps                                                                                Importance
                                                                                                                    Correlation
                                            0.4               0.2            0.0              0.2             0.4
                                                                            Value

Figure 2: Parameter Importance and Correlation with MCC performance


Table 5
Comparison of Monolingual and Multilingual Approaches
                                        Run 1 - Monolingual Approach               Run 2 - Multilingual Approach
                                          EN             ES                          EN               ES
                          MCC           0.7894         0.6445                      0.7965           0.7028
                        F1-macro        0.8947         0.8160                      0.8977           0.8497
                      F1-conspiracy     0.8617         0.7523                      0.8637           0.8035
                        F1-critical     0.9276         0.8796                      0.9317           0.8960


5. Official Competition Results and Conclusion
Table 5 presents the test results, demonstrating that Run 2, which employs a single multilingual model,
outperforms the monolingual models. Notably, in both languages, the baseline performance of BERT
(MCC 0.7964) is exceeded. Out of 82 teams, only 17 surpass this threshold. Particularly striking is the
performance in Spanish, where only 13 teams exceed the MCC threshold of 0.6681, placing us in the
top three.
   These results highlight the potential advantages of multilingual models in achieving robust perfor-
mance across languages. The improved performance in Run 2 suggests that training a multilingual
model on data from both languages mitigates the so-called “curse of multilinguality”, where multi-
lingual models often struggle to distribute their knowledge equally across all languages. This phe-
nomenon has been documented in the literature, where multilingual models tend to underperform on
low-resource languages due to an imbalance in data distribution and representation [22, 23]. Our find-
ings supports that providing a balanced dataset across languages can significantly enhance the fairness
and effectiveness of multilingual models, as other works have applied these to counter content evasion
on social media platforms [6, 24].
   Furthermore, this study underscores the importance of addressing biases in large language models
(LLMs). The bias observed in the Claude 2.0 Opus model, which showed a tendency to classify texts
as conspiracy-related, raises critical questions about the ethical deployment of AI technologies. Such
biases can have profound implications for freedom of expression and the equitable treatment of diverse
perspectives. Future research should focus on developing techniques to identify and mitigate these
biases, ensuring that LLMs operate fairly across different socio-cultural contexts.
   In conclusion, our findings support the utility of multilingual models in handling diverse linguistic
data, provided that training data is well-distributed across languages. The competition has allow us
to conduct a research that demonstrate the potential of such models in achieving high performance
and also emphasizes the necessity of continuous efforts to address and mitigate inherent biases in AI
systems. Moving forward, it is essential to explore advanced methodologies for bias detection and
mitigation, which will be crucial for the ethical and effective application of AI technologies in real-
world scenarios.


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