Phonemer at WNUT-2020 Task 2: Sequence Classification Using COVID Twitter BERT and Bagging Ensemble Technique based on Plurality Voting
This work addresses the challenge of filtering relevant information from social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying informative COVID-19 English tweets by developing a system that uses deep learning models and an ensemble technique, achieving an F1-score of 0.9037 and ranking sixth in the WNUT-2020 shared task.
This paper presents the approach that we employed to tackle the EMNLP WNUT-2020 Shared Task 2 : Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. The task is to develop a system that automatically identifies whether an English Tweet related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is informative or not. We solve the task in three stages. The first stage involves pre-processing the dataset by filtering only relevant information. This is followed by experimenting with multiple deep learning models like CNNs, RNNs and Transformer based models. In the last stage, we propose an ensemble of the best model trained on different subsets of the provided dataset. Our final approach achieved an F1-score of 0.9037 and we were ranked sixth overall with F1-score as the evaluation criteria.