KnowTellConvince at ArAIEval shared task: disinformation and persuasion detection in Arabic using similar and contrastive representation alignment

In an era of widespread digital communication, the challenge of identifying and countering disinformation has become increasingly critical. However, compared to the solutions available in the English language, the resources and strategies for tackling this multifaceted problem in Arabic are relatively scarce. To address this issue, this paper presents our solutions to tasks in ArAIEval 2023. Task 1 focuses on detecting persuasion techniques, while Task 2 centers on disinformation detection within Arabic text. Leveraging a multi-head model architecture, fine-tuning techniques, sequential learning, and innovative activation functions, our contributions significantly enhance persuasion techniques and disinformation detection accuracy. Beyond improving performance, our work fills a critical research gap in content analysis for Arabic, empowering individuals, communities, and digital platforms to combat deceptive content effectively and preserve the credibility of information sources within the Arabic-speaking world.