H-Prop and H-Prop-News: Computational Propaganda Datasets in Hindi

Abstract

In this digital era, people rely on the internet for their news consumption. As people are free to express their opinions on social media, much information shared on the internet is loaded with propaganda. Propagandist contents are intended to influence public opinion. In the mainstream media or prominent news agencies, the authors’ and news agencies’ own bias may impact in the news contents. Hence, it is required to detect such propaganda spread through news articles. Detection and classification of propagandist text require standard, high-quality, annotated datasets. A few datasets are available for propaganda classification. However, these datasets are mostly in English. Hindi is the most spoken language in India, and efforts are needed to detect its propagandist contents. This research work introduces two new datasets: H-Prop and H-Prop-News, which consist of news articles in Hindi annotated as propaganda or non-propaganda. The H-Prop dataset is generated by translating 28,630 news articles from the QProp dataset. The H-Prop-News dataset contains 5500 news articles collected from 32 prominent Hindi news websites. We experiment with the proposed datasets using four supervised machine learning models combined with different feature vectors and word embeddings. Our experiments achieve 87% accuracy using Logistic Regression with TF-IDF feature vectors. The datasets provide high-quality labeled news articles in Hindi and open new avenues for researchers to explore techniques for analyzing and classifying propaganda in Hindi text.

Keywords

• propaganda identification
• news articles analysis
• Hindi text processing