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Identification of COVID-19 Related Fake News via Neural Stacking

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Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation (CONSTRAINT 2021)

Abstract

Identification of Fake News plays a prominent role in the ongoing pandemic, impacting multiple aspects of day-to-day life. In this work we present a solution to the shared task titled COVID19 Fake News Detection in English, scoring the 50th place amongst 168 submissions. The solution was within 1.5% of the best performing solution. The proposed solution employs a heterogeneous representation ensemble, adapted for the classification task via an additional neural classification head comprised of multiple hidden layers. The paper consists of detailed ablation studies further displaying the proposed method’s behavior and possible implications. The solution is freely available.

https://gitlab.com/boshko.koloski/covid19-fake-news

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  1. 1.

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Acknowledgements

The work of the last author was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) through a young researcher grant. The work of other authors was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency core research programme Knowledge Technologies (P2-0103) and the ARRS funded research projects Semantic Data Mining for Linked Open Data (ERC Complementary Scheme, N2-0078) and Computer-assisted multilingual news discourse analysis with contextual embeddings - J6-2581). The work was also supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825153, project EMBEDDIA (Cross-Lingual Embeddings for Less-Represented Languages in European News Media).

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Koloski, B., Stepišnik-Perdih, T., Pollak, S., Škrlj, B. (2021). Identification of COVID-19 Related Fake News via Neural Stacking. In: Chakraborty, T., Shu, K., Bernard, H.R., Liu, H., Akhtar, M.S. (eds) Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation. CONSTRAINT 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1402. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73696-5_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73696-5_17

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