On the Performance of Different Text Classification Strategies on Conspiracy Classification in Social Media

This paper summarizes the contribution of our team UIBK-DBISFAKENEWS to the shared task “FakeNews: Corona Virus and Conspiracies Multimedia Analysis Task” as part of MediaEval 2021, the goal of which is to classify tweets based on their textual content. The task features the three sub-tasks (i) Text-Based Misinformation Detection, (ii) Text-Based Conspiracy Theories Recognition, and (iii) Text-Based Combined Misinformation and Conspiracies Detection. We achieved our best results for all three sub-tasks using the pre-trained language model BERT Base[1], with extremely randomized trees and support vector machines as runner ups. We further show that syntactic features using dependency grammar are ineffective, resulting in prediction scores close to a random baseline. Copyright 2021 for this paper by its authors.

A Duo-generative Approach to Explainable Multimodal COVID-19 Misinformation Detection

This paper focuses on a critical problem of explainable multimodal COVID-19 misinformation detection where the goal is to accurately detect misleading information in multimodal COVID-19 news articles and provide the reason or evidence that can explain the detection results. Our work is motivated by the lack of judicious study of the association between different modalities (e.g., text and image) of the COVID-19 news content in current solutions. In this paper, we present a generative approach to detect multimodal COVID-19 misinformation by investigating the cross-modal association between the visual and textual content that is deeply embedded in the multimodal news content. Two critical challenges exist in developing our solution: 1) how to accurately assess the consistency between the visual and textual content of a multimodal COVID-19 news article? 2) How to effectively retrieve useful information from the unreliable user comments to explain the misinformation detection results? To address the above challenges, we develop a duo-generative explainable misinformation detection (DGExplain) framework that explicitly explores the cross-modal association between the news content in different modalities and effectively exploits user comments to detect and explain misinformation in multimodal COVID-19 news articles. We evaluate DGExplain on two real-world multimodal COVID-19 news datasets. Evaluation results demonstrate that DGExplain significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of the accuracy of multimodal COVID-19 misinformation detection and the explainability of detection explanations. © 2022 ACM.

A Multimodal Misinformation Detector for COVID-19 Short Videos on TikTok

This paper studies an emerging and important problem of identifying misleading COVID-19 short videos where the misleading content is jointly expressed in the visual, audio, and textual content of videos. Existing solutions for misleading video detection mainly focus on the authenticity of videos or audios against AI algorithms (e.g., deepfake) or video manipulation, and are insufficient to address our problem where most videos are user-generated and intentionally edited. Two critical challenges exist in solving our problem: i) how to effectively extract information from the distractive and manipulated visual content in TikTok videos? ii) How to efficiently aggregate heterogeneous information across different modalities in short videos? To address the above challenges, we develop TikTec, a multimodal misinformation detection framework that explicitly exploits the captions to accurately capture the key information from the distractive video content, and effectively learns the composed misinformation that is jointly conveyed by the visual and audio content. We evaluate TikTec on a real-world COVID- 19 video dataset collected from TikTok. Evaluation results show that TikTec achieves significant performance gains compared to state-of-the-art baselines in accurately detecting misleading COVID-19 short videos. © 2021 IEEE.

Text-Based Analysis of COVID-19 Comments Using Natural Language Processing

In dialectology, Natural Language Processing is the process of recognizing the various ontologies of words generated in human language. Various techniques are used for analyzing the corpus from naturally generated content by users on various platforms. The analysis of these textual contents collected during the COVID-19 has become a goldmine for marketing experts as well as for researchers, thus making social media comments available on various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., a popular area of applied artificial intelligence. Text-Based Analysis is measured as one of the exasperating responsibilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The chief objective of this paper is to work on a corpus that generates relevant information from web-based statements during COVID-19. The findings of the work may give useful insights to researchers working on Text analytics, and authorities concerning to current pandemic. To achieve this, NLP is discussed which extracts relevant information and comparatively computes the morphology on publicly available data thus concluding knowledge behind the corpus. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.