In this work, we release COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT), a transformer-based model, pretrained on a large corpus of Twitter messages on the topic of COVID-19. Our model shows a 10-30% marginal improvement compared to its base model, BERT-Large, on five different classification datasets. The largest improvements are on the target domain. Pretrained transformer models, such as CT-BERT, are trained on a specific target domain and can be used for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks, including classification, question-answering and chatbots. CT-BERT is optimised to be used on COVID-19 content, in particular social media posts from Twitter.
In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pandemic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweets and conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, info…
As COVID-19 ravages the world, social media analytics could augment traditional surveys in assessing how the pandemic evolves and capturing consumer chatter that could help healthcare agencies in addressing it. This typically involves mining disclosure events that mention testing positive for the disease or discussions surrounding perceptions and beliefs in preventative or treatment options. The 2020 shared task on COVID-19 event extraction (conducted as part of the W-NUT workshop during the EMNLP conference) introduced a new Twitter dataset for benchmarking event extraction from COVID-19 twee…
DCSE, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan（巴基斯坦白沙瓦工程与技术大学DCSE）；Abasyn University Islamabad Campus, Pakistan（巴基斯坦阿巴辛大学伊斯兰堡校区）；Department of AI, AJOU University, South Korea（韩国亚洲大学人工智能系）；Department of Computer Science, Munster Technological University, Cork, Ireland（爱尔兰科克芒斯特理工大学计算机科学系）
This paper presents our solutions for the MediaEval 2022 task on DisasterMM. The task is composed of two subtasks, namely (i) Relevance Classification of Twitter Posts (RCTP), and (ii) Location Extraction from Twitter Texts (LETT). The RCTP subtask aims at differentiating flood-related and non-relevant social posts while LETT is a Named Entity Recognition (NER) task and aims at the extraction of location information from the text. For RCTP, we proposed four different solutions based on BERT, RoBERTa, Distil BERT, and ALBERT obtaining an F1-score of 0.7934, 0.7970, 0.7613, and 0.7924, respectiv…
The automation of adverse drug reaction (ADR) detection in social media would revolutionize the practice of pharmacovigilance, supporting drug regulators, the pharmaceutical industry and the general public in ensuring the safety of the drugs prescribed in daily practice. Following from the published proceedings of the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) Applications Workshop & Shared Task in August 2019, we aimed to develop a deep learning model to classify ADRs within Twitter tweets that contain drug mentions. Our approach involved fine-tuning $BERT_{LARGE}$ and two domain-specific BERT im…
Saginaw Valley State University（萨吉诺谷州立大学）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；University of Nebraska at Kearney（内布拉斯加大学卡尼尔分校）
Online news and information sources are convenient and accessible ways to learn about current issues. For instance, more than 300 million people engage with posts on Twitter globally, which provides the possibility to disseminate misleading information. There are numerous cases where violent crimes have been committed due to fake news. This research presents the CovidMis20 dataset (COVID-19 Misinformation 2020 dataset), which consists of 1,375,592 tweets collected from February to July 2020. CovidMis20 can be automatically updated to fetch the latest news and is publicly available at: https://…
At the time of this study, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has spread significantly across the world. Considering the uncertainty about policies, health risks, financial difficulties, etc. the online media, specially the Twitter platform, is experiencing a high volume of activity related to this pandemic. Among the hot topics, the polarized debates about unconfirmed medicines for the treatment and prevention of the disease have attracted significant attention from online media users. In this work, we present a stance data set, COVID-CQ, of user-generated content on Twitt…
St John’s College（圣约翰学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In this paper, we compare the performances of traditional machine learning models using feature engineering and word vectors and the state-of-the-art language model BERT using word embeddings on three datasets. We also consider the time and cost efficiency of feature engineering compared to BERT. From our results we conclude that the use of the BERT model was only worth the time and cost trade-off for one of the three datasets we used for comparison, where the BERT model significantly outperformed any kind of traditional classifier that uses feature vectors, instead of embeddings. Using the BE…
Human Language Technology Research Institute, University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校人类语言技术研究所）
Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. However, exposure to misinformation does not necessarily indicate misinformation adoption. In this paper we describe a novel framework for identifying the stance towards misinformation, relying on attitude consistency and its properties. The interactions between attitude consistency, adoption or rejection of misinformation and the content of microblogs are exploited in a novel…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；City University of New York（纽约市立大学）
The understanding of the public response to COVID-19 vaccines is the key success factor to control the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the public response, there is a need to explore public opinion. Traditional surveys are expensive and time-consuming, address limited health topics, and obtain small-scale data. Twitter can provide a great opportunity to understand public opinion regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The current study proposes an approach using computational and human coding methods to collect and analyze a large number of tweets to provide a wider perspective on the COVID-19 vaccine. …
Center of Innovation and Development in Artificial Intelligence（人工智能创新与发展中心）；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·库拉大学）
The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19), emerged late December 2019 in China, is now rapidly spreading across the globe. At the time of writing this paper, the number of global confirmed cases has passed two millions and half with over 180,000 fatalities. Many countries have enforced strict social distancing policies to contain the spread of the virus. This have changed the daily life of tens of millions of people, and urged people to turn their discussions online, e.g., via online social media sites like Twitter. In this work, we describe the first Arabic tweets dataset on COVID-19 that we ha…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Stonybrook University（石溪大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
In this paper, we present an iterative graph-based approach for the detection of symptoms of COVID-19, the pathology of which seems to be evolving. More generally, the method can be applied to finding context-specific words and texts (e.g. symptom mentions) in large imbalanced corpora (e.g. all tweets mentioning #COVID-19). Given the novelty of COVID-19, we also test if the proposed approach generalizes to the problem of detecting Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR). We find that the approach applied to Twitter data can detect symptom mentions substantially before being reported by the Centers for Dis…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
Although multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been available for several months now, vaccine hesitancy continues to be at high levels in the United States. In part, the issue has also become politicized, especially since the presidential election in November. Understanding vaccine hesitancy during this period in the context of social media, including Twitter, can provide valuable guidance both to computational social scientists and policy makers. Rather than studying a single Twitter corpus, this paper takes a novel view of the problem by comparatively studying two Twitter datasets collected betwee…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal University（伊玛目阿卜杜勒拉赫曼·本·费萨尔大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
This paper describes the participation of the QMUL-SDS team for Task 1 of the CLEF 2020 CheckThat! shared task. The purpose of this task is to determine the check-worthiness of tweets about COVID-19 to identify and prioritise tweets that need fact-checking. The overarching aim is to further support ongoing efforts to protect the public from fake news and help people find reliable information. We describe and analyse the results of our submissions. We show that a CNN using COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) enhanced with numeric expressions can effectively boost performance from baseline results. We …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The study aims to understand Twitter users' discourse and psychological reactions to COVID-19. We use machine learning techniques to analyze about 1.9 million Tweets (written in English) related to coronavirus collected from January 23 to March 7, 2020. A total of salient 11 topics are identified and then categorized into ten themes, including "updates about confirmed cases," "COVID-19 related death," "cases outside China (worldwide)," "COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea," "early signs of the outbreak in New York," "Diamond Princess cruise," "economic impact," "Preventive measures," "authorities…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Weizenbaum Institute（魏茨鲍姆研究所）
We classify seven months' worth of Belgian COVID-related Tweets using multilingual BERT and relate them to their governments' COVID measures. We classify Tweets by their stated opinion on Belgian government curfew measures (too strict, ok, too loose). We examine the change in topics discussed and views expressed over time and in reference to dates of related events such as implementation of new measures or COVID-19 related announcements in the media.
COVID-19 misinformation on social media platforms such as twitter is a threat to effective pandemic management. Prior works on tweet COVID-19 misinformation negates the role of semantic features common to twitter such as charged emotions. Thus, we present a novel COVID-19 misinformation model, which uses both a tweet emotion encoder and COVID-19 misinformation encoder to predict whether a tweet contains COVID-19 misinformation. Our emotion encoder was fine-tuned on a novel annotated dataset and our COVID-19 misinformation encoder was fine-tuned on a subset of the COVID-HeRA dataset. Experiment…
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；VNU-HCM（越南国立大学胡志明市分校）
The outbreak COVID-19 virus caused a significant impact on the health of people all over the world. Therefore, it is essential to have a piece of constant and accurate information about the disease with everyone. This paper describes our prediction system for WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of Informative COVID-19 English Tweets. The dataset for this task contains size 10,000 tweets in English labeled by humans. The ensemble model from our three transformer and deep learning models is used for the final prediction. The experimental result indicates that we have achieved F1 for the INFORMATIVE…
We describe the systems developed for the WNUT-2020 shared task 2, identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. BERT is a highly performant model for Natural Language Processing tasks. We increased BERT's performance in this classification task by fine-tuning BERT and concatenating its embeddings with Tweet-specific features and training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification (henceforth called BERT+). We compared its performance to a suite of machine learning models. We used a Twitter specific data cleaning pipeline and word-level TF-IDF to extract features for the non-BE…
Words are malleable objects, influenced by events that are reflected in written texts. Situated in the global outbreak of COVID-19, our research aims at detecting semantic shifts in social media language triggered by the health crisis. With COVID-19 related big data extracted from Twitter, we train separate word embedding models for different time periods after the outbreak. We employ an alignment-based approach to compare these embeddings with a general-purpose Twitter embedding unrelated to COVID-19. We also compare our trained embeddings among them to observe diachronic evolution. Carrying …
From conspiracy theories to fake cures and fake treatments, COVID-19 has become a hot-bed for the spread of misinformation online. It is more important than ever to identify methods to debunk and correct false information online. In this paper, we present a methodology and analyses to characterize the two competing COVID-19 misinformation communities online: (i) misinformed users or users who are actively posting misinformation, and (ii) informed users or users who are actively spreading true information, or calling out misinformation. The goals of this study are two-fold: (i) collecting a div…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms were ideal for communicating due to social isolation and quarantine. Also, it was the primary source of misinformation dissemination on a large scale, referred to as the infodemic. Therefore, automatic debunking misinformation is a crucial problem. To tackle this problem, we present two COVID-19 related misinformation datasets on Twitter and propose a misinformation detection system comprising network-based and content-based processes based on machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques. In the network-based process, we focus on social pr…
As of writing this paper, COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) has spread to more than 220 countries and territories. Following the outbreak, the pandemic's seriousness has made people more active on social media, especially on the microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Weibo. The pandemic-specific discourse has remained on-trend on these platforms for months now. Previous studies have confirmed the contributions of such socially generated conversations towards situational awareness of crisis events. The early forecasts of cases are essential to authorities to estimate the requirements of …
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）；Fiji National University（斐济国立大学）；UNSW Sydney（新南威尔士大学悉尼分校）
Topic modelling with innovative deep learning methods has gained interest for a wide range of applications that includes COVID-19. Topic modelling can provide, psychological, social and cultural insights for understanding human behaviour in extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use prominent deep learning-based language models for COVID-19 topic modelling taking into account data from emergence (Alpha) to the Omicron variant. We apply topic modeling to review the public behaviour across the first, second and third waves based on Twitter dataset from India. Our results…
Social media like Twitter provide a common platform to share and communicate personal experiences with other people. People often post their life experiences, local news, and events on social media to inform others. Many rescue agencies monitor this type of data regularly to identify disasters and reduce the risk of lives. However, it is impossible for humans to manually check the mass amount of data and identify disasters in real-time. For this purpose, many research works have been proposed to present words in machine-understandable representations and apply machine learning methods on the w…
The novel corona-virus disease (also known as COVID-19) has led to a pandemic, impacting more than 200 countries across the globe. With its global impact, COVID-19 has become a major concern of people almost everywhere, and therefore there are a large number of tweets coming out from every corner of the world, about COVID-19 related topics. In this work, we try to analyze the tweets and detect the trending topics and major concerns of people on Twitter, which can enable us to better understand the situation, and devise better planning. More specifically we propose a model based on the universa…
Since the classification of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, there have been many attempts to treat and contain the virus. Although there is no specific antiviral treatment recommended for COVID-19, there are several drugs that can potentially help with symptoms. In this work, we mined a large twitter dataset of 424 million tweets of COVID-19 chatter to identify discourse around drug mentions. While seemingly a straightforward task, due to the informal nature of language use in Twitter, we demonstrate the need of machine learning alongside traditional automated methods to aid in this task. By ap…
Vaccine hesitancy is considered as one main cause of the stagnant uptake ratio of COVID-19 vaccines in Europe and the US where vaccines are sufficiently supplied. Fast and accurate grasp of public attitudes toward vaccination is critical to address vaccine hesitancy, and social media platforms have proved to be an effective source of public opinions. In this paper, we describe the collection and release of a dataset of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines. This dataset consists of the IDs of 2,198,090 tweets collected from Western Europe, 17,934 of which are annotated with the originators' vacc…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
The objective of the study is to examine coronavirus disease (COVID-19) related discussions, concerns, and sentiments that emerged from tweets posted by Twitter users. We analyze 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 25 hashtags such as "coronavirus," "COVID-19," "quarantine" from March 1 to April 21 in 2020. We use a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigram, bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected Tweets. Popular unigrams include "virus," "lockdown," and "quarantine." Popular big…
The scientific community continues to publish an overwhelming amount of new research related to COVID-19 on a daily basis, leading to much literature without little to no attention. To aid the community in understanding the rapidly flowing array of COVID-19 literature, we propose a novel BERT architecture that provides a brief yet original summarization of lengthy papers. The model continually learns on new data in online fashion while minimizing catastrophic forgetting, thus fitting to the need of the community. Benchmark and manual examination of its performance show that the model provide a…
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science（莱顿高级计算机科学研究所）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）
During the COVID-19 pandemic, large amounts of COVID-19 misinformation are spreading on social media. We are interested in the stance of Twitter users towards COVID-19 misinformation. However, due to the relative recent nature of the pandemic, only a few stance detection datasets fit our task. We have constructed a new stance dataset consisting of 2631 tweets annotated with the stance towards COVID-19 misinformation. In contexts with limited labeled data, we fine-tune our models by leveraging the MNLI dataset and two existing stance detection datasets (RumourEval and COVIDLies), and evaluate t…
Recently, COVID-19 has affected a variety of real-life aspects of the world and led to dreadful consequences. More and more tweets about COVID-19 has been shared publicly on Twitter. However, the plurality of those Tweets are uninformative, which is challenging to build automatic systems to detect the informative ones for useful AI applications. In this paper, we present our results at the W-NUT 2020 Shared Task 2: Identification of Informative COVID-19 English Tweets. In particular, we propose our simple but effective approach using the transformer-based models based on COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT…
In this paper we introduce ArCOV19-Rumors, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset for misinformation detection composed of tweets containing claims from 27th January till the end of April 2020. We collected 138 verified claims, mostly from popular fact-checking websites, and identified 9.4K relevant tweets to those claims. Tweets were manually-annotated by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. ArCOV19-Rumors supports two levels of misinformation detection over Twitter: verifying free-text claims (called claim-level ver…
The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on social media can inform us on how we are conceptualizing the pandemic and how we are reacting to its development. This paper provides an extensive explorative analysis of how the discourse about Covid-19 reported on Twitter changes through time, focusing on the first wave of this pandemic. Based on an extensive corpus of tweets (produced between 20th March and 1st July 2020) first we show how the topics associated with the development of the pandemic changed through time, using topic modeling. Second, we show how the sentimen…
Transcending the binary categorization of racist and xenophobic texts, this research takes cues from social science theories to develop a four dimensional category for racism and xenophobia detection, namely stigmatization, offensiveness, blame, and exclusion. With the aid of deep learning techniques, this categorical detection enables insights into the nuances of emergent topics reflected in racist and xenophobic expression on Twitter. Moreover, a stage wise analysis is applied to capture the dynamic changes of the topics across the stages of early development of Covid-19 from a domestic epid…
Public sentiment (the opinions, attitudes or feelings expressed by the public) is a factor of interest for government, as it directly influences the implementation of policies. Given the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 crisis, having an up-to-date representation of public sentiment on governmental measures and announcements is crucial. While the 'staying-at-home' policy makes face-to-face interactions and interviews challenging, analysing real-time Twitter data that reflects public opinion toward policy measures is a cost-effective way to access public sentiment. In this context, we colle…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）
Developing an understanding of the public discourse on COVID-19 vaccination on social media is important not only for addressing the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also for future pathogen outbreaks. We examine a Twitter dataset containing 75 million English tweets discussing COVID-19 vaccination from March 2020 to March 2021. We train a stance detection algorithm using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to classify tweets as `anti-vax' or `pro-vax', and examine the main topics of discourse using topic modelling techniques. While pro-vax tweets (37 million) far outnumbered anti-vax t…
Putnam Science Academy（普特南科学院）；Princeton High School（普林斯顿高中）；Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
This study verified the effectiveness of Donald Trump's Twitter campaign in guiding agen-da-setting and deflecting political risk and examined Trump's Twitter communication strategy and explores the communication effects of his tweet content during Covid-19 pandemic. We collected all tweets posted by Trump on the Twitter platform from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020.We used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis with a fixed effects model to analyze the existence of the Twitter strategy. The correlation between the number of con-firmed daily Covid-19 diagnoses and the number of …
The appearance of complex attention-based language models such as BERT, Roberta or GPT-3 has allowed to address highly complex tasks in a plethora of scenarios. However, when applied to specific domains, these models encounter considerable difficulties. This is the case of Social Networks such as Twitter, an ever-changing stream of information written with informal and complex language, where each message requires careful evaluation to be understood even by humans given the important role that context plays. Addressing tasks in this domain through Natural Language Processing involves severe ch…
Breaking BERT: Gradient Attack on Twitter Sentiment Analysis for Targeted Misclassification
School of Computer Science Engineering and Information Systems, Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工学院计算机科学工程与信息系统学院）；Center for AI Research (CAIR), University of Agder(UiA)（阿格德大学人工智能研究中心）；College of Computer Science and Information Technology, IAU（IAU计算机科学与信息技术学院）
Topic models are widely used in studying social phenomena. We conduct a comparative study examining state-of-the-art neural versus non-neural topic models, performing a rigorous quantitative and qualitative assessment on a dataset of tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that not only do neural topic models outperform their classical counterparts on standard evaluation metrics, but they also produce more coherent topics, which are of great benefit when studying complex social problems. We also propose a novel regularization term for neural topic models, which is designed to addr…
News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most platforms were used to transmit relevant news, guidelines and precautions to people. According to WHO, uncontrolled conspiracy theories and propaganda are spreading faster than the COVID-19 pandemic itself, creating an infodemic and thus causing psychological panic, misleading medical advises, and economic disruption. Accordingly, discussions have been init…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Twitter has acted as an important source of information during disasters and pandemic, especially during the times of COVID-19. In this paper, we describe our system entry for WNUT 2020 Shared Task-3. The task was aimed at automating the extraction of a variety of COVID-19 related events from Twitter, such as individuals who recently contracted the virus, someone with symptoms who were denied testing and believed remedies against the infection. The system consists of separate multi-task models for slot-filling subtasks and sentence-classification subtasks while leveraging the useful sentence-l…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing urgency for medical community to keep up with the accelerating growth in the new coronavirus-related literature. As a result, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge has released a corpus of scholarly articles and is calling for machine learning approaches to help bridging the gap between the researchers and the rapidly growing publications. Here, we take advantage of the recent advances in pre-trained NLP models, BERT and OpenAI GPT-2, to solve this challenge by performing text summarization on this dataset. We evaluate the results using ROU…
We present IndoBERTweet, the first large-scale pretrained model for Indonesian Twitter that is trained by extending a monolingually-trained Indonesian BERT model with additive domain-specific vocabulary. We focus in particular on efficient model adaptation under vocabulary mismatch, and benchmark different ways of initializing the BERT embedding layer for new word types. We find that initializing with the average BERT subword embedding makes pretraining five times faster, and is more effective than proposed methods for vocabulary adaptation in terms of extrinsic evaluation over seven Twitter-b…
The reported work is our straightforward approach for the shared task Classification of tweets self-reporting age organized by the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) workshop. This literature describes the approach that was used to build a binary classification system, that classifies the tweets related to birthday posts into two classes namely, exact age(positive class) and non-exact age(negative class). We made two submissions with variations in the preprocessing of text which yielded F1 scores of 0.80 and 0.81 when evaluated by the organizers.
Amirkabir University of Technology（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学）；Allame Tabatabaei Universiy（阿拉梅·塔巴塔巴伊大学）；Tarbiat Modarres University（塔比亚特莫达雷斯大学）
One of the new scientific ways of understanding discourse dynamics is analyzing the public data of social networks. This research's aim is Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (PDA) of Covid-19 phenomenon (inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory) by using Intelligent Data Mining for Persian Society. The examined big data is five million tweets from 160,000 users of the Persian Twitter network to compare two discourses. Besides analyzing the tweet texts individually, a social network graph database has been created based on retweets relationships. We use the VoteRank algorithm to intr…
Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines)（印度理工学院（印度矿业学院））
We experiment with COVID-Twitter-BERT and RoBERTa models to identify informative COVID-19 tweets. We further experiment with adversarial training to make our models robust. The ensemble of COVID-Twitter-BERT and RoBERTa obtains a F1-score of 0.9096 (on the positive class) on the test data of WNUT-2020 Task 2 and ranks 1st on the leaderboard. The ensemble of the models trained using adversarial training also produces similar result.
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused globally significant impacts since the beginning of 2020. This brought a lot of confusion to society, especially due to the spread of misinformation through social media. Although there were already several studies related to the detection of misinformation in social media data, most studies focused on the English dataset. Research on COVID-19 misinformation detection in Indonesia is still scarce. Therefore, through this research, we collect and annotate datasets for Indonesian and build prediction models for detecting COVID-19 misinformation by considering the…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
As of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic is full-blown on a global scale, people's need to have access to legitimate information regarding COVID-19 is more urgent than ever, especially via online media where the abundance of irrelevant information overshadows the more informative ones. In response to such, we proposed a model that, given an English tweet, automatically identifies whether that tweet bears informative content regarding COVID-19 or not. By ensembling different BERTweet model configurations, we have achieved competitive results that are only shy of those by top performing teams by ro…
ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre（ESRC商业与地方政府数据研究中心）
We build a sentence-level political discourse classifier using existing human expert annotated corpora of political manifestos from the Manifestos Project (Volkens et al., 2020a) and applying them to a corpus ofCOVID-19Press Briefings (Chatsiou, 2020). We use manually annotated political manifestos as training data to train a local topic ConvolutionalNeural Network (CNN) classifier; then apply it to the COVID-19PressBriefings Corpus to automatically classify sentences in the test corpus.We report on a series of experiments with CNN trained on top of pre-trained embeddings for sentence-level cl…
Analyzing COVID-19 Vaccination Sentiments in Nigerian Cyberspace: Insights from a Manually Annotated Twitter Dataset
Northeastern University（东北大学）；HausaNLP（豪萨自然语言处理实验室）；Bayero University Kano（卡诺巴耶罗大学）；University of Porto（波尔图大学）；Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈杜·贝洛大学）；University Of Maiduguri（迈杜古里大学）；University of Abuja（阿布贾大学）
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main（法兰克福大学）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
We introduce the well-established social scientific concept of social solidarity and its contestation, anti-solidarity, as a new problem setting to supervised machine learning in NLP to assess how European solidarity discourses changed before and after the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic. To this end, we annotate 2.3k English and German tweets for (anti-)solidarity expressions, utilizing multiple human annotators and two annotation approaches (experts vs.\ crowds). We use these annotations to train a BERT model with multiple data augmentation strategies. Our augmented BERT mod…
