Researches about COVID-19 has increased largely, no matter in the biology field or the others. This research conducted a text analysis using LDA topic model. We firstly scraped totally 1127 articles and 5563 comments on SCMP covering COVID-19 from Jan 20 to May 19, then we trained the LDA model and tuned parameters based on the Cv coherence as the model evaluation method. With the optimal model, dominant topics, representative documents of each topic and the inconsistence between articles and comments are analyzed. 3 possible improvements are discussed at last.
The purpose of this study is to analyse COVID-19 related news published across different geographical places, in order to gain insights in reporting differences. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major outbreak in January 2020 and was followed by different preventive measures, lockdown, and finally by the process of vaccination. To date, more comprehensive analysis of news related to COVID-19 pandemic are missing, especially those which explain what aspects of this pandemic are being reported by newspapers inserted in different economies and belonging to different political alignments. Since LDA is …
Although many fact-checking systems have been developed in academia and industry, fake news is still proliferating on social media. These systems mostly focus on fact-checking but usually neglect online users who are the main drivers of the spread of misinformation. How can we use fact-checked information to improve users' consciousness of fake news to which they are exposed? How can we stop users from spreading fake news? To tackle these questions, we propose a novel framework to search for fact-checking articles, which address the content of an original tweet (that may contain misinformation…
News recommender systems (NRs) have been shown to shape public discourse and to enforce behaviors that have a critical, oftentimes detrimental effect on democracies. Earlier research on the impact of media bias has revealed their strong impact on opinions and preferences. Responsible NRs are supposed to have depolarizing capacities, once they go beyond accuracy measures. We performed sequence prediction by using the BERT4Rec algorithm to investigate the interplay of news of coverage and user behavior. Based on live data and training of a large data set from one news outlet "event bursts", "ral…
News reporting on events that occur in our society can have different styles and structures as well as different dynamics of news spreading over time. News publishers have the potential to spread their news and reach out to a large number of readers worldwide. In this paper we would like to understand how well they are doing it and which kind of obstacles the news may encounter when spreading. The news to be spread wider cross multiple barriers such as linguistic (the most evident one as they get published in other natural languages), economic, geographical, political, time zone, and cultural …
University of Tyumen（秋明大学）；"Organization of cognitive associative systems" LLC（“认知联想系统组织”有限责任公司）
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on various areas of human life. Hence, the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences are being actively discussed on social media. However, not all social media posts are truthful. Many of them spread fake news that cause panic among readers, misinform people and thus exacerbate the effect of the pandemic. In this paper, we present our results at the Constraint@AAAI2021 Shared Task: COVID-19 Fake News Detection in English. In particular, we propose our approach using the transformer-based ensemble of COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) models. We describe t…
IIIT Sri City（印度国际信息技术学院斯里城校区）；IIIT Delhi（德里国际信息技术学院）；IIT Patna（巴特那印度理工学院）
Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an `infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines - Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.46% F1-score with SVM. The data and code…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
The evolution of social media platforms have empowered everyone to access information easily. Social media users can easily share information with the rest of the world. This may sometimes encourage spread of fake news, which can result in undesirable consequences. In this work, we train models which can identify health news related to COVID-19 pandemic as real or fake. Our models achieve a high F1-score of 98.64%. Our models achieve second place on the leaderboard, tailing the first position with a very narrow margin 0.05% points.
With the rapid continuing spread of COVID-19, it is clearly important to be able to track the progress of the virus over time in order to be better prepared to anticipate its emergence and spread in new regions as well as declines in its presence in regions thereby leading to or justifying "reopening" decisions. There are many applications and web sites that monitor officially released numbers of cases which are likely to be the most accurate methods for tracking the progress of the virus; however, they will not necessarily paint a complete picture. To begin filling any gaps in official report…
First identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared as a global emergency in January, and a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). Along with this pandemic, we are also experiencing an "infodemic" of information with low credibility such as fake news and conspiracies. In this work, we present ReCOVery, a repository designed and constructed to facilitate research on combating such information regarding COVID-19. We first broadly search and investigate ~2,000 news publishers, from which 60 are identified with extreme [high or low…
Ahead of the Spread: Agent-Driven Virtual Propagation for Early Fake News Detection
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Key Laboratory of Dependable Service Computing in Cyber Physical Society (Chongqing University), Ministry of Education（教育部可信赖服务计算 cyber-physical 社会重点实验室（重庆大学））；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Emory Unversity（埃默里大学）
The COVID-19 pandemic has gained worldwide attention and allowed fake news, such as ``COVID-19 is the flu,'' to spread quickly and widely on social media. Combating this coronavirus infodemic demands effective methods to detect fake news. To this end, we propose a method to infer news credibility from hashtags involved in news dissemination on social media, motivated by the tight connection between hashtags and news credibility observed in our empirical analyses. We first introduce a new graph that captures all (direct and \textit{indirect}) relationships among hashtags. Then, a language-indep…
Detecting whether a news article is fake or genuine is a crucial task in today's digital world where it's easy to create and spread a misleading news article. This is especially true of news stories shared on social media since they don't undergo any stringent journalistic checking associated with main stream media. Given the inherent human tendency to share information with their social connections at a mouse-click, fake news articles masquerading as real ones, tend to spread widely and virally. The presence of echo chambers (people sharing same beliefs) in social networks, only adds to this …
Conventional preventive measures during pandemic include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges - vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is the prevailing COVID-19; as the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter include studies centring on datasets from online social media platforms where th…
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；INFN Sezione di Catania（意大利国家核物理研究所卡塔尼亚分部）；Complexity Science Hub Vienna（维也纳复杂性科学中心）
In early January 2020, after China reported the first cases of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the city of Wuhan, unreliable and not fully accurate information has started spreading faster than the virus itself. Alongside this pandemic, people have experienced a parallel infodemic, i.e., an overabundance of information, some of which misleading or even harmful, that has widely spread around the globe. Although Social Media are increasingly being used as information source, Web Search Engines, like Google or Yahoo!, still represent a powerful and trustworthy resource for finding information…
