Transformer based Automatic COVID-19 Fake News Detection System
This work provides an incremental improvement for the specific task of COVID-19 fake news detection, which can help reduce the spread of misinformation and panic among the public.
The paper addresses the problem of detecting fake news related to the COVID-19 pandemic on social media. Their ensemble of three transformer models (BERT, ALBERT, and XLNET) achieved an F1-score of 0.9855 on the test set, ranking 5th out of 160 teams in the ConstraintAI 2021 shared task.
Recent rapid technological advancements in online social networks such as Twitter have led to a great incline in spreading false information and fake news. Misinformation is especially prevalent in the ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, leading to individuals accepting bogus and potentially deleterious claims and articles. Quick detection of fake news can reduce the spread of panic and confusion among the public. For our analysis in this paper, we report a methodology to analyze the reliability of information shared on social media pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our best approach is based on an ensemble of three transformer models (BERT, ALBERT, and XLNET) to detecting fake news. This model was trained and evaluated in the context of the ConstraintAI 2021 shared task COVID19 Fake News Detection in English. Our system obtained 0.9855 f1-score on testset and ranked 5th among 160 teams.