GateNLP at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting for Multilingual Narrative Classification

Abstract: The proliferation of online news and the increasing spread of misinformation necessitate robust methods for automatic data analysis. Narrative classification is emerging as a important task, since identifying what is being said online is critical for fact-checkers, policy markers and other professionals working on information studies. This paper presents our approach to SemEval 2025 Task 10 Subtask 2, which aims to classify news articles into a pre-defined two-level taxonomy of main narratives and sub-narratives across multiple languages. We propose Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting (H3Prompt) for multilingual narrative classification. Our methodology follows a three-step LLM prompting strategy, where the model first categorises an article into one of two domains (Ukraine-Russia War or Climate Change), then identifies the most relevant main narratives, and finally assigns sub-narratives. Our approach secured the top position on the English test set among 28 competing teams worldwide. The code is available at https://github.com/GateNLP/H3Prompt.