Navigating the Kaleidoscope of COVID-19 Misinformation Using Deep Learning

Yuanzhi Chen, Mohammad Hasan


Abstract
Irrespective of the success of the deep learning-based mixed-domain transfer learning approach for solving various Natural Language Processing tasks, it does not lend a generalizable solution for detecting misinformation from COVID-19 social media data. Due to the inherent complexity of this type of data, caused by its dynamic (context evolves rapidly), nuanced (misinformation types are often ambiguous), and diverse (skewed, fine-grained, and overlapping categories) nature, it is imperative for an effective model to capture both the local and global context of the target domain. By conducting a systematic investigation, we show that: (i) the deep Transformer-based pre-trained models, utilized via the mixed-domain transfer learning, are only good at capturing the local context, thus exhibits poor generalization, and (ii) a combination of shallow network-based domain-specific models and convolutional neural networks can efficiently extract local as well as global context directly from the target data in a hierarchical fashion, enabling it to offer a more generalizable solution.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.485
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6000–6017
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.485
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.485
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanzhi Chen and Mohammad Hasan. 2021. Navigating the Kaleidoscope of COVID-19 Misinformation Using Deep Learning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6000–6017, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Navigating the Kaleidoscope of COVID-19 Misinformation Using Deep Learning (Chen & Hasan, EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.485.pdf
Video:
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