Author(s): Hossain, Tamanna T | Advisor(s): Singh, Sameer | Abstract: The ongoing pandemic has heightened the need for developing tools to flag COVID-19-related misinformation on the internet, specifically on social media such as Twitter. However, due to novel language and the rapid change of information, existing misinformation detection datasets are not effective for evaluating systems designed to detect misinformation on this topic. Misinformation detection can be divided into two sub-tasks: (i) retrieval of misconceptions relevant to posts being checked for veracity, and (ii) stance detection to identify whether the posts Agree, Disagree, or express No Stance towards the retrieved misconceptions. To facilitate research on this task, we release COVIDLIES, a dataset of 6591 expert-annotated tweets to evaluate the performance of misinformation detection systems on 62 different pieces of COVID-19 related misinformation. We evaluate existing NLP systems on this dataset, providing initial benchmarks and identifying key challenges for future models to improve upon. For the stance detection sub-task we provide benchmark models in zero-shot and few-shot settings. In addition to evaluation of the models using standard metrics, we also provide behaviour testing of the best models of each setting.

/pdf/covidlies-detecting-covid-19-misinformation-on-social-media-4a9zdcou8w.pdf

COVIDLIES: Detecting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media

Our work considers leveraging crowd signals for detecting fake news and is motivated by tools recently introduced by Facebook that enable users to flag fake news. By aggregating users' flags, our goal is to select a small subset of news every day, send them to an expert (e.g., via a third-party fact-checking organization), and stop the spread of news identified as fake by an expert. The main objective of our work is to minimize the spread of misinformation by stopping the propagation of fake news in the network. It is especially challenging to achieve this objective as it requires detecting fake news with high-confidence as quickly as possible. We show that in order to leverage users' flags efficiently, it is crucial to learn about users' flagging accuracy. We develop a novel algorithm, DETECTIVE, that performs Bayesian inference for detecting fake news and jointly learns about users' flagging accuracy over time. Our algorithm employs posterior sampling to actively trade off exploitation (selecting news that maximize the objective value at a given epoch) and exploration (selecting news that maximize the value of information towards learning about users' flagging accuracy). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via extensive experiments and show the power of leveraging community signals for fake news detection.

Fake News Detection in Social Networks via Crowd Signals

Recently, the use of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Sina Weibo has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. It is considered as a convenient platform for users to share personal messages, pictures, and videos. However, while people enjoy social networks, many deceptive activities such as fake news or rumors can mislead users into believing misinformation. Besides, spreading the massive amount of misinformation in social networks has become a global risk. Therefore, misinformation detection (MID) in social networks has gained a great deal of attention and is considered an emerging area of research interest. We find that several studies related to MID have been studied to new research problems and techniques. While important, however, the automated detection of misinformation is difficult to accomplish as it requires the advanced model to understand how related or unrelated the reported information is when compared to real information. The existing studies have mainly focused on three broad categories of misinformation: false information, fake news, and rumor detection. Therefore, related to the previous issues, we present a comprehensive survey of automated misinformation detection on (i) false information, (ii) rumors, (iii) spam, (iv) fake news, and (v) disinformation. We provide a state-of-the-art review on MID where deep learning (DL) is used to automatically process data and create patterns to make decisions not only to extract global features but also to achieve better results. We further show that DL is an effective and scalable technique for the state-of-the-art MID. Finally, we suggest several open issues that currently limit real-world implementation and point to future directions along this dimension.

/pdf/deep-learning-for-misinformation-detection-on-online-social-31cbqg7q86.pdf

Deep learning for misinformation detection on online social networks: a survey and new perspectives

Online social networking sites are experimenting with the following crowd-powered procedure to reduce the spread of fake news and misinformation: whenever a user is exposed to a story through her feed, she can flag the story as misinformation and, if the story receives enough flags, it is sent to a trusted third party for fact checking. If this party identifies the story as misinformation, it is marked as disputed. However, given the uncertain number of exposures, the high cost of fact checking, and the trade-off between flags and exposures, the above mentioned procedure requires careful reasoning and smart algorithms which, to the best of our knowledge, do not exist to date. In this paper, we first introduce a flexible representation of the above procedure using the framework of marked temporal point processes. Then, we develop a scalable online algorithm, CURB, to select which stories to send for fact checking and when to do so to efficiently reduce the spread of misinformation with provable guarantees. In doing so, we need to solve a novel stochastic optimal control problem for stochastic differential equations with jumps, which is of independent interest. Experiments on two real-world datasets gathered from Twitter and Weibo show that our algorithm may be able to effectively reduce the spread of fake news and misinformation.

/pdf/leveraging-the-crowd-to-detect-and-reduce-the-spread-of-fake-fmh0reydq4.pdf

Leveraging the Crowd to Detect and Reduce the Spread of Fake News and Misinformation

The issues of online fake news have attained an increasing eminence in the diffusion of shaping news stories online. Misleading or unreliable information in the form of videos, posts, articles, URLs is extensively disseminated through popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result, editors and journalists are in need of new tools that can help them to pace up the verification process for the content that has been originated from social media. Motivated by the need for automated detection of fake news, the goal is to find out which classification model identifies phony features accurately using three feature extraction techniques, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF), Count-Vectorizer (CV) and Hashing-Vectorizer (HV). Also, in this paper, a novel multi-level voting ensemble model is proposed. The proposed system has been tested on three datasets using twelve classifiers. These ML classifiers are combined based on their false prediction ratio. It has been observed that the Passive Aggressive, Logistic Regression and Linear Support Vector Classifier (LinearSVC) individually perform best using TF-IDF, CV and HV feature extraction approaches, respectively, based on their performance metrics, whereas the proposed model outperforms the Passive Aggressive model by 0.8%, Logistic Regression model by 1.3%, LinearSVC model by 0.4% using TF-IDF, CV and HV, respectively. The proposed system can also be used to predict the fake content (textual form) from online social media websites.

Automating fake news detection system using multi-level voting model

Accuracy is one of the basic principles of journalism. However, it is increasingly hard to manage due to the diversity of news media. Some editors of online news tend to use catchy headlines which trick readers into clicking. These headlines are either ambiguous or misleading, degrading the reading experience of the audience. Thus, identifying inaccurate news headlines is a task worth studying. Previous work names these headlines "clickbaits" and mainly focus on the features extracted from the headlines, which limits the performance since the consistency between headlines and news bodies is underappreciated. In this paper, we clearly redefine the problem and identify ambiguous and misleading headlines separately. We utilize class sequential rules to exploit structure information when detecting ambiguous headlines. For the identification of misleading headlines, we extract features based on the congruence between headlines and bodies. To make use of the large unlabeled data set, we apply a co-training method and gain an increase in performance. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our methods. Then we use our classifiers to detect inaccurate headlines crawled from different sources and conduct a data analysis.

/pdf/learning-to-identify-ambiguous-and-misleading-news-headlines-3i0gw6lb0s.pdf

Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines

Word embedding is a distributed representation of words in a vector space. It involves a mathematical embedding from a space with one dimension per word to a continuous vector space with much lower dimension. It performs well on tasks including synonym and hyponym detection by grouping similar words. However, most existing word embeddings are insensitive to antonyms, since they are trained based on word distributions in a large amount of text data, where antonyms usually have similar contexts. To generate word embeddings that are capable of detecting antonyms, we firstly modify the objective function of Skip-Gram model, and then utilize the supervised synonym and antonym information in thesauri as well as the sentiment information of each word in SentiWordNet. We conduct evaluations on three relevant tasks, namely GRE antonym detection, word similarity, and semantic textual similarity. The experiment results show that our antonym-sensitive embedding outperforms common word embeddings in these tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of our methods.

Improving Word Embeddings for Antonym Detection Using Thesauri and SentiWordNet

With the purpose of attracting clicks, online news publishers and editors use diverse strategies to make their headlines catchy, with a sacrifice of accuracy. Specifically, a considerable portion of news headlines is ambiguous. Such headlines are unclear relative to the content of the story, and largely degrade the reading experience of the audience. In this paper, we focus on dealing with the information gap caused by the ambiguous news headlines. We define a new task of explaining ambiguous headlines with short informative texts, and build a benchmark dataset for evaluation. We address the task by selecting a proper sentence from the news body to resolve the ambiguity in an ambiguous headline. Both feature engineering methods and neural network methods are explored. For feature engineering, we improve a standard SVM classifier with elaborately designed features. For neural networks, we propose an ambiguity-aware neural matching model based on a previous model. Utilizing automatic and manual evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the efficacy and the complementarity of the two methods, and the ambiguity-aware neural matching model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on this challenging task.

/pdf/learning-to-explain-ambiguous-headlines-of-online-news-6rwstc7xc8.pdf

Learning to explain ambiguous headlines of online news

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Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines

Improving Word Embeddings for Antonym Detection Using Thesauri and SentiWordNet

Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines

Learning to explain ambiguous headlines of online news