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This paper presents the results of the UNLP 2025 Shared Task on Detecting Social Media Manipulation. The task included two tracks: Technique Classification and Span Identification. 
The benchmark dataset contains 9,557 posts from Ukrainian Telegram channels manually annotated by media experts. A total of 51 teams registered, 22 teams submitted systems, and 595 runs were evaluated on a hidden test set via Kaggle. Performance was measured with macro F1 for classification and token‑level F1 for identification. 
The shared task provides the first publicly available benchmark for manipulation detection in Ukrainian social media and highlights promising directions for low‑resource propaganda research. The Kaggle leaderboard is left open for further submissions.

ACL 2025

The UNLP 2025 Shared Task on Detecting Social Media Manipulation

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The Russia-Ukraine war has transformed social media into a critical battleground for information warfare, making the detection of manipulation techniques in online content an urgent security concern. This work presents our system developed for the UNLP 2025 Shared Tasks, which addresses both manipulation technique classification and span identification in Ukrainian Telegram posts. In this paper, we have explored several machine learning approaches (LR, SVC, GB, NB) , deep learning architectures (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU hybrid) and state-of-the-art multilingual transformers (mDeBERTa, InfoXLM, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa). Our experiments showed that fine-tuning transformer models for the specific tasks significantly improved their performance, with XLM-RoBERTa large delivering the best results by securing 3rd place in technique classification task with a Macro F1 score of 0.4551 and 2nd place in span identification task with a span F1 score of 0.6045. These results demonstrate that large pre-trained multilingual models effectively detect subtle manipulation tactics in Slavic languages, advancing the development of tools to combat online manipulation in political contexts.

Detecting Manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram: A Transformer-Based Approach to Technique Classification and Span Identification

This paper presents one of the top-performing solutions to the UNLP 2025 Shared Task on Detecting Manipulation in Social Media. The task focuses on detecting and classifying rhetorical and stylistic manipulation techniques used to influence Ukrainian Telegram users. For the classification subtask, we fine-tuned the Gemma 2 language model with LoRA adapters and applied a second-level classifier leveraging meta-features and threshold optimization. For span detection, we employed an XLM-RoBERTa model trained for multi-target, including token binary classification. Our approach achieved 2nd place in classification and 3rd place in span detection.

Hidden Persuasion: Detecting Manipulative Narratives on Social Media During the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Detecting manipulation techniques in online text is vital for combating misinformation, a task complicated by generative AI. This paper compares machine learning approaches for multi-label classification of 10 techniques in Ukrainian Telegram content (UNLP 2025 Shared Task 1). Our evaluation included TF-IDF, fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa-Large, PEFT-LLM (Gemma, Mistral) and a RAG approach (E5 + Mistral Nemo). The fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa-Large model, which incorporates weighted loss to address class imbalance, yielded the highest Macro F1 score (0.4346). This result surpassed the performance of TF-IDF (Macro F1 0.32-0.36), the PEFT-LLM (0.28-0.33) and RAG (0.309). Synthetic data slightly helped TF-IDF but reduced transformer model performance. The results demonstrate the strong performance of standard transformers like XLM-R when appropriately configured for this classification task.

Comparing Methods for Multi-Label Classification of Manipulation Techniques in Ukrainian Telegram Content

In this paper, we present our solutions for the two UNLP 2025 shared tasks: manipulation span detection and manipulation technique classification in Ukraine-related media content sourced from Telegram channels. 

We experimented with fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with up to 12 billion parameters, including both encoder- and decoder-based architectures. Our experiments identified Gemma 3 12b with a custom classification head as the best-performing model for both tasks. 

To address the limited size of the original training dataset, we generated 50k synthetic samples and marked up an additional 400k media entries containing manipulative content.

Framing the Language: Fine-Tuning Gemma 3 for Manipulation Detection

We participated in the Fourth UNLP shared task on detecting social media manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram posts, addressing both multilabel technique classification and token-level span identification. We propose two complementary solutions: for classification, we fine-tune the decoder-only model with class-balanced grid-search thresholding and ensembling. For span detection, we convert causal LLM into a bidirectional encoder via masked language modeling pretraining on large Ukrainian and Russian news corpora before fine-tuning. Our solutions achieve SOTA metric results on both shared task track. Our work demonstrates the efficacy of bidirectional pretraining for decoder-only LLMs and robust threshold optimization, contributing new methods for disinformation detection in low-resource languages.

Transforming Causal LLM into MLM Encoder for Detecting Social Media Manipulation in Telegram


This study examines the lexical and syntactic interventions of human and LLM proofreading aimed at improving overall intelligibility in identical second language writings, and evaluates the consistency of outcomes across three LLMs (ChatGPT-4o, Llama3.1-8b, Deepseek-r1-8b). Findings show that both human and LLM proofreading enhance bigram lexical features, which may contribute to better coherence and contextual connectedness between adjacent words. However, LLM proofreading exhibits a more generative approach, extensively reworking vocabulary and sentence structures, such as employing more diverse and sophisticated vocabulary and incorporating a greater number of adjective modifiers in noun phrases. The proofreading outcomes are highly consistent in major lexical and syntactic features across the three models.

Comparing human and LLM proofreading in L2 writing: Impact on lexical and syntactic features

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed various domains, particularly computer science (CS) education. These models exhibit remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks and problem-solving, raising questions about their potential and limitations in advanced CS contexts. This study presents a novel bilingual (English–Romanian) multimodal (text and image) dataset of multiple-choice questions derived from a high-level computer science competition. A particularity of our dataset is that the problems are conceived such that some of them are easier solved using reasoning on paper, while for others writing code is more efficient. We systematically evaluate State of The Art LLMs on this dataset, analyzing their performance on theoretical programming tasks. Our findings reveal the strengths and limitations of current LLMs, including the influence of language choice (English vs. Romanian), providing insights into their applicability in CS education and competition settings. We also address critical ethical considerations surrounding educational integrity and the fairness of assessments in the context of LLM usage. These discussions aim to inform future educational practices and policies. To support further research, our dataset will be made publicly available in both English and Romanian. Additionally, we release an educational application tailored for Romanian students, enabling them to self-assess using the dataset in an interactive and practice-oriented environment.

MateInfoUB: A Real-World Benchmark for Testing LLMs in Competitive, Multilingual, and Multimodal Educational Tasks

Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) refers to automated scoring of open-ended textual responses to specific questions, both in natural language form. In this paper, we propose a method to tackle this task in a setting where annotated data is unavailable. Crucially, our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art while being lighter and interpretable. 
We crafted a unique dataset containing a highly diverse set of questions and a small amount of answers to these questions; making it more challenging compared to previous tasks. 
Our method uses weak labels generated from other methods proven to be effective in this task, which are then used to train a white-box (linear) regression based on a few interpretable features. The latter are extracted expert features and learned representations that are interpretable \textit{per se} and aligned with manual labeling. 
We show the potential of our method by evaluating it on a small annotated portion of the dataset, and demonstrate that its ability compares with that of strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods, comprising an LLM that in contrast to our method comes with a high computational price and an opaque reasoning process. 
We further validate our model on a public Automatic Essay Scoring dataset in English, and obtained competitive results compared to other unsupervised baselines, outperforming the LLM. To gain further insights of our method, we conducted an interpretability analysis revealing sparse weights in our linear regression model, and alignment between our features and human ratings.\footnote{Code available at \href{https://github.com/furrutiav/unasages-bea2025}{furrutiav/unasages-bea2025}}

Unsupervised Automatic Short Answer Grading and Essay Scoring: A Weakly Supervised Explainable Approach

Multiple-Choice Tasks are one of the most common types of assessment item, due to their feature of being easy to automatically and objectively grade. A key component of Multiple-Choice Tasks are distractors -- i.e., the wrong answer options -- since poor distractors affect the overall quality of the item: e.g., if they are obviously wrong, they are never selected. Thus, previous research has focused extensively on techniques for automatically generating distractors, which can be especially helpful in settings where large pools of questions are desirable or needed. However, there is no agreement within the community about the techniques that are most suited to evaluate generated distractors, and the ones used in the literature are sometimes not aligned with how distractors perform in real exams. In this review paper, we perform a comprehensive study of the approaches which are used in the literature for evaluating generated distractors, propose a taxonomy to categorise them, discuss if and how they are aligned with distractors performance in exam settings, and what are the differences for different question types and educational domains.

A Survey on Automated Distractor Evaluation in Multiple-Choice Tasks

This paper investigates the potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) as adaptive tutors in the context of second-language learning. In particular, we evaluate whether system prompting can reliably constrain LLMs to generate only text appropriate to the student's competence level. We simulate full teacher-student dialogues in Spanish using instruction-tuned, open-source LLMs ranging in size from 7B to 12B parameters. Dialogues are generated by having an LLM alternate between tutor and student roles with separate chat histories. The output from the tutor model is then used to evaluate the effectiveness of CEFR-based prompting to control text difficulty across three proficiency levels (A1, B1, C1). Our findings suggest that while system prompting can be used to constrain model outputs, prompting alone is too brittle for sustained, long-term interactional contexts - a phenomenon we term alignment drift. Our results provide insights into the feasibility of LLMs for personalized, proficiency aligned adaptive tutors and provide a scalable method for low-cost evaluation of model performance without human participants.

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Detecting Manipulation in Ukrainian Telegram: A Transformer-Based Approach to Technique Classification and Span Identification

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