A Corpus of Persuasion Techniques in Slavic Languages

2026-07-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of fine-grained annotated corpora for rhetorical strategies in Slavic languages by presenting the first large-scale, multi-level corpus of persuasive techniques covering Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian. The resource comprises 222 documents on trending topics and approximately 7,500 annotated text segments, jointly labeled at both coarse and fine granularity across six categories encompassing 25 distinct persuasion strategies. Leveraging both classical machine learning and generative AI models, the work establishes baseline systems for detecting and classifying persuasive tactics at both document and sentence levels. It further provides comprehensive statistical analyses and a cross-topic framework for examining rhetorical associations. This corpus constitutes a foundational resource for advancing research in computational rhetoric and disinformation detection within Slavic linguistic contexts.

Abstract

Persuasion techniques are powerful rhetorical devices used to sway public opinion in a wide range of media. We present a new corpus of persuasion techniques, focusing on Slavic languages. The corpus contains documents in Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian, annotated with persuasion techniques at the coarse-grained text-span level and fine-grained sentence level. The techniques are drawn from a taxonomy of 25 fine-grained persuasion techniques, grouped under six broad categories of rhetorical persuasion strategies. The corpus contains approximately 7500 text spans from 222 documents that cover topics hotly debated at the national and international levels. We describe the corpus creation process, provide detailed statistics, and examine correlations between topics and persuasion techniques. We use classic ML-based and generative AI-based models to provide baselines and benchmark results for the detection and classification of persuasion techniques at the text-span level and sentence level.

Problem

• persuasion techniques
• Slavic languages
• annotated corpus
• rhetorical strategies
• text annotation

Innovation

• persuasion techniques
• Slavic languages
• annotated corpus
• fine-grained classification
• generative AI