Gradient Flush at Slavic NLP 2025 Task: Leveraging Slavic BERT and Translation for Persuasion Techniques Classification

The task of persuasion techniques detection is limited by several challenges, such as insufficient training data and ambiguity in labels.In this paper, we describe a solution for the Slavic NLP 2025 Shared Task.It utilizes multilingual XLM-RoBERTa, that was trained on 100 various languages, and Slavic BERT, a model finetuned on four languages of the Slavic group.We suggest to augment the training dataset with related data from previous shared tasks, as well as some automatic translations from English and German.The resulting solutions are ranked among the top 3 for Russian in the Subtask 1 and for all languages in the Subtask 2. We release the code for our solution. 1