McRock at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Mistral 7B for Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques In Memes

One of the most widely used content types in internet misinformation campaigns is memes. Since they can readily reach a big number of users on social media sites, they are most successful there. Memes used in a disinformation campaign include a variety of rhetorical and psychological strategies, including smearing, name-calling, and causal oversimplification, to achieve their goal of influencing users. The shared task's objective is to develop models for recognizing these strategies solely in a meme's textual content (Subtask 1) and in a multimodal context where both the textual and visual material must be analysed simultaneously (Subtasks two and three). In this paper, we discuss the application of a Mistral 7B model to address the Subtask one in English about finding the persuasive strategy that a meme employs from a hierarchy of twenty based just on its textual content. Only a portion of the reward is awarded if the technique's ancestor node is chosen. This classification issue is multilabel hierarchical. Our approach based on the use of a Mistral 7B model obtains a Hierarchical F1 of 0.42 a Hierarchical Precision of 0.30 and a Hierarchical Recall of 0.71. Our selected approach is able to outperform the baseline provided for the competition.