Rumor and gossip: The social psychology of hearsay.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice, and inspirational stories. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful information, there was also a new blending of medical and political misinformation and disinformation, which gave rise to the first global infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures, panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. This is a complex problem that needs a holistic approach combining the perspectives of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, government entities, social media platforms, and society as a whole. Taking them into account we define an annotation schema and detailed annotation instructions, which reflect these perspectives. We performed initial annotations using this schema, and our initial experiments demonstrated sizable improvements over the baselines. Now, we issue a call to arms to the research community and beyond to join the fight by supporting our crowdsourcing annotation efforts.

Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in Social Media: A Holistic Perspective and a Call to Arms.

Twitter sentiment detectors (TSDs) provide a better solution to evaluate the quality of service and product than other traditional technologies. The classification accuracy and detection performance of TSDs, which are extremely reliant on the performance of the classification techniques, are used, and the quality of input features is provided. However, the time required is a big problem for the existing machine learning methods, which leads to a challenge for all enterprises that aim to transform their businesses to be processed by automated workflows. Deep learning techniques have been utilized in several real-world applications in different fields such as sentiment analysis. Deep learning approaches use different algorithms to obtain information from raw data such as texts or tweets and represent them in certain types of models. These models are used to infer information about new datasets that have not been modeled yet. We present a new effective method of sentiment analysis using deep learning architectures by combining the “universal language model fine-tuning” (ULMFiT) with support vector machine (SVM) to increase the detection efficiency and accuracy. The method introduces a new deep learning approach for Twitter sentiment analysis to detect the attitudes of people toward certain products based on their comments. The extensive results on three datasets illustrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results over all datasets. For example, the accuracy performance is 99.78% when it is applied on the Twitter US Airlines dataset.

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A Novel Machine Learning Approach for Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Incorporating the Universal Language Model Fine-Tuning and SVM

The sudden widespread menace created by the present global pandemic COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on our lives. Man-kind is going through humongous fear and dependence on social media like never before. Fear inevitably leads to panic, speculations, and the spread of misinformation. Many governments have taken measures to curb the spread of such misinformation for public well being. Besides global measures, to have effective outreach, systems for demographically local languages have an important role to play in this effort. Towards this, we propose an approach to detect fake news about COVID-19 early on from social media, such as tweets, for multiple Indic-Languages besides English. In addition, we also create an annotated dataset of Hindi and Bengali tweet for fake news detection. We propose a BERT based model augmented with additional relevant features extracted from Twitter to identify fake tweets. To expand our approach to multiple Indic languages, we resort to mBERT based model which is fine-tuned over created dataset in Hindi and Bengali. We also propose a zero-shot learning approach to alleviate the data scarcity issue for such low resource languages. Through rigorous experiments, we show that our approach reaches around 89% F-Score in fake tweet detection which supercedes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Moreover, we establish the first benchmark for two Indic-Languages, Hindi and Bengali. Using our annotated data, our model achieves about 79% F-Score in Hindi and 81% F-Score for Bengali Tweets. Our zero-shot model achieves about 81% F-Score in Hindi and 78% F-Score for Bengali Tweets without any annotated data, which clearly indicates the efficacy of our approach.

No Rumours Please! A Multi-Indic-Lingual Approach for COVID Fake-Tweet Detection

The COVID-19 epidemic is considered as the global health crisis of the whole society and the greatest challenge mankind faced since World War Two. Unfortunately, the fake news about COVID-19 is spreading as fast as the virus itself. The incorrect health measurements, anxiety, and hate speeches will have bad consequences on people's physical health, as well as their mental health in the whole world. To help better combat the COVID-19 fake news, we propose a new fake news detection dataset MM-COVID(Multilingual and Multidimensional COVID-19 Fake News Data Repository). This dataset provides the multilingual fake news and the relevant social context. We collect 3981 pieces of fake news content and 7192 trustworthy information from English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, French and Italian, 6 different languages. We present a detailed and exploratory analysis of MM-COVID from different perspectives and demonstrate the utility of MM-COVID in several potential applications of COVID-19 fake news study on multilingual and social media.

MM-COVID: A Multilingual and Multimodal Data Repository for Combating COVID-19 Disinformation.

The creation, dissemination, and consumption of disinformation and fabricated content on social media is a growing concern, especially with the ease of access to such sources, and the lack of awareness of the existence of such false information. In this paper, we present an overview of the techniques explored to date for the combating of disinformation with various forms. We introduce different forms of disinformation, discuss factors related to the spread of disinformation, elaborate on the inherent challenges in detecting disinformation, and show some approaches to mitigating disinformation via education, research, and collaboration. Looking ahead, we present some promising future research directions on disinformation.

Combating disinformation in a social media age

Contrastive self-supervised learning has become a prominent technique in representation learning. The main step in these methods is to contrast semantically similar and dissimilar pairs of samples. However, in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the augmentation methods used in creating similar pairs with regard to contrastive learning (CL) assumptions are challenging. This is because, even simply modifying a word in the input might change the semantic meaning of the sentence, and hence, would violate the distributional hypothesis. In this review paper, we formalize the contrastive learning framework, emphasize the considerations that need to be addressed in the data transformation step, and review the state-of-the-art methods and evaluations for contrastive representation learning in NLP. Finally, we describe some challenges and potential directions for learning better text representations using contrastive methods.

Text Transformations in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: A Review

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues its global devastation, numerous accompanying challenges emerge. One important challenge we face is to efficiently and effectively use recently gathered data and find computational tools to combat the COVID-19 infodemic, a typical information overloading problem. Novel coronavirus presents many questions without ready answers; its uncertainty and our eagerness in search of solutions offer a fertile environment for infodemic. It is thus necessary to combat the infodemic and make a concerted effort to confront COVID-19 and mitigate its negative impact in all walks of life when saving lives and maintaining normal orders during trying times. In this position paper of combating the COVID-19 infodemic, we illustrate its need by providing real-world examples of rampant conspiracy theories, misinformation, and various types of scams that take advantage of human kindness, fear, and ignorance. We present three key challenges in this fight against the COVID-19 infodemic where researchers and practitioners instinctively want to contribute and help. We demonstrate that these three challenges can and will be effectively addressed by collective wisdom, crowdsourcing, and collaborative research.

Challenges in Combating COVID-19 Infodemic -- Data, Tools, and Ethics

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues its global devastation, numerous accompanying challenges emerge One important challenge we face is to efficiently and effectively use recently gathered data and find computational tools to combat the COVID-19 infodemic, a typical information overloading problem Novel coronavirus presents many questions without ready answers;its uncertainty and our eagerness in search of solutions offer a fertile environment for infodemic It is thus necessary to combat the infodemic and make a concerted effort to confront COVID-19 and mitigate its negative impact in all walks of life when saving lives and maintaining normal orders during trying times In this position paper of combating the COVID-19 infodemic, we illustrate its need by providing real-world examples of rampant conspiracy theories, misinformation, and various types of scams that take advantage of human kindness, fear, and ignorance We present three key challenges in this fight against the COVID-19 infodemic where researchers and practitioners instinctively want to contribute and help We demonstrate that these challenges can and will be effectively addressed by collective wisdom, crowd sourcing, and collaborative research © 2020 CEUR-WS All rights reserved

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Challenges in combating COVID-19 infodemic - Data, tools, and ethics

In this paper we address the solution of the popular Wordle puzzle, using new reinforcement learning methods, which apply more generally to adaptive control of dynamic systems and to classes of Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) problems. These methods are based on approximation in value space and the rollout approach, ad-mit a straightforward implementation, and provide improved performance over various heuristic approaches. For the Wordle puzzle, they yield on-line solution strategies that are very close to optimal at relatively modest computational cost. Our methods are viable for more complex versions of Wordle and related search problems, for which an optimal strategy would be impossible to compute. They are also applicable to a wide range of adaptive sequential decision problems that involve an unknown or fre-quently changing environment whose parameters are estimated on-line.

Amrita Bhattacharjee

Papers

Combating disinformation in a social media age

Text Transformations in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: A Review

Challenges in Combating COVID-19 Infodemic -- Data, Tools, and Ethics

Challenges in combating COVID-19 infodemic - Data, tools, and ethics

Reinforcement Learning Methods for Wordle: A POMDP/Adaptive Control Approach