COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Middle Income Countries

Jongin Kim, Byeo Rhee Bak, Aditya Agrawal, Jiaxi Wu, Veronika Wirtz, Traci Hong, Derry Wijaya


Abstract
This paper introduces a multilingual dataset of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, consisting of annotated tweets from three middle-income countries: Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The expertly curated dataset includes annotations for 5,952 tweets, assessing their relevance to COVID-19 vaccines, presence of misinformation, and the themes of the misinformation. To address challenges posed by domain specificity, the low-resource setting, and data imbalance, we adopt two approaches for developing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection models: domain-specific pre-training and text augmentation using a large language model. Our best misinformation detection models demonstrate improvements ranging from 2.7 to 15.9 percentage points in macro F1-score compared to the baseline models. Additionally, we apply our misinformation detection models in a large-scale study of 19 million unlabeled tweets from the three countries between 2020 and 2022, showcasing the practical application of our dataset and models for detecting and analyzing vaccine misinformation in multiple countries and languages. Our analysis indicates that percentage changes in the number of new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rates in a staggered manner for Brazil and Indonesia, and there are significant positive associations between the misinformation rates across the three countries.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.237
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3903–3915
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.237
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.237
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jongin Kim, Byeo Rhee Bak, Aditya Agrawal, Jiaxi Wu, Veronika Wirtz, Traci Hong, and Derry Wijaya. 2023. COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Middle Income Countries. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3903–3915, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Middle Income Countries (Kim et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.237.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.237.mp4