ACTI at EVALITA 2023: Overview of the Conspiracy Theory Identification Task
This addresses the challenge of detecting misinformation in online platforms, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying conspiracy theories in Telegram comments by introducing a new shared task at EVALITA 2023, with results showing that large language models were the best-performing approaches among 81 submissions from 15 teams.
Conspiracy Theory Identication task is a new shared task proposed for the first time at the Evalita 2023. The ACTI challenge, based exclusively on comments published on conspiratorial channels of telegram, is divided into two subtasks: (i) Conspiratorial Content Classification: identifying conspiratorial content and (ii) Conspiratorial Category Classification about specific conspiracy theory classification. A total of fifteen teams participated in the task for a total of 81 submissions. We illustrate the best performing approaches were based on the utilization of large language models. We finally draw conclusions about the utilization of these models for counteracting the spreading of misinformation in online platforms.