Detecting Multilingual COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media via Contextualized Embeddings

Subhadarshi Panda, Sarah Ita Levitan


Abstract
We present machine learning classifiers to automatically identify COVID-19 misinformation on social media in three languages: English, Bulgarian, and Arabic. We compared 4 multitask learning models for this task and found that a model trained with English BERT achieves the best results for English, and multilingual BERT achieves the best results for Bulgarian and Arabic. We experimented with zero shot, few shot, and target-only conditions to evaluate the impact of target-language training data on classifier performance, and to understand the capabilities of different models to generalize across languages in detecting misinformation online. This work was performed as a submission to the shared task, NLP4IF 2021: Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic. Our best models achieved the second best evaluation test results for Bulgarian and Arabic among all the participating teams and obtained competitive scores for English.
Anthology ID:
2021.nlp4if-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
Venue:
NLP4IF
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
125–129
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4if-1.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4if-1.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Subhadarshi Panda and Sarah Ita Levitan. 2021. Detecting Multilingual COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media via Contextualized Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, pages 125–129, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Multilingual COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media via Contextualized Embeddings (Panda & Levitan, NLP4IF 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4if-1.19.pdf
Code
 subhadarship/nlp4if-2021