Document Retrieval and Claim Verification to Mitigate COVID-19 Misinformation

Megha Sundriyal, Ganeshan Malhotra, Md Shad Akhtar, Shubhashis Sengupta, Andrew Fano, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation on online social media has grown exponentially. Unverified bogus claims on these platforms regularly mislead people, leading them to believe in half-baked truths. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to verify claims to combat this avalanche of misinformation. However, establishing such claims’ veracity is becoming increasingly challenging, partly due to the plethora of information available, which is difficult to process manually. Thus, it becomes imperative to verify claims automatically without human interventions. To cope up with this issue, we propose an automated claim verification solution encompassing two steps – document retrieval and veracity prediction. For the retrieval module, we employ a hybrid search-based system with BM25 as a base retriever and experiment with recent state-of-the-art transformer-based models for re-ranking. Furthermore, we use a BART-based textual entailment architecture to authenticate the retrieved documents in the later step. We report experimental findings, demonstrating that our retrieval module outperforms the best baseline system by 10.32 NDCG@100 points. We escort a demonstration to assess the efficacy and impact of our suggested solution. As a byproduct of this study, we present an open-source, easily deployable, and user-friendly Python API that the community can adopt.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCONSTRAINT 2022 - 2nd Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation, Proceedings of the Workshop
EditorsTanmoy Chakraborty, Md. Shad Akhtar, Kai Shu, H. Russell Bernard, Maria Liakata, Preslav Nakov
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages66-74
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917315
StatePublished - 2022
Event2nd Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation, CONSTRAINT 2022 - Dublin, Ireland
Duration: May 27 2022 → …

Publication series

NameCONSTRAINT 2022 - 2nd Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation, Proceedings of the Workshop

Conference

Conference2nd Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation, CONSTRAINT 2022
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityDublin
Period5/27/22 → …

Funding

T. Chakraborty would like to acknowledge the support of the Ramanujan Fellowship, and ihubAnubhuti-iiitd Foundation set up under the NMICPS scheme of the Department of Science and Technology, India. M. S. Akhtar and T. Chakraborty thank Infosys Centre for AI at IIIT-Delhi for the valuable support. T. Chakraborty would like to acknowledge the support of the Ramanujan Fellowship, and ihub-Anubhuti-iiitd Foundation set up under the NM-ICPS scheme of the Department of Science and Technology, India. M. S. Akhtar and T. Chakraborty thank Infosys Centre for AI at IIIT-Delhi for the valuable support.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Linguistics and Language

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