Team Jack Ryder at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Using BERT Representations for Detecting Hyperpartisan News

We describe the system submitted by the Jack Ryder team to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on Hyperpartisan News Detection. The task asked participants to predict whether a given article is hyperpartisan, i.e., extreme-left or extreme-right. We proposed an approach based on BERT with fine-tuning, which was ranked 7th out 28 teams on the distantly supervised dataset, where all articles from a hyperpartisan/non-hyperpartisan news outlet are considered to be hyperpartisan/non-hyperpartisan. On a manually annotated test dataset, where human annotators double-checked the labels, we were ranked 29th out of 42 teams.

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