COVIDLies: Detecting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media

Tamanna Hossain, Robert L. Logan IV, Arjuna Ugarte, Yoshitomo Matsubara, Sean Young, Sameer Singh

Keywords: COVID-19, misinformation, dataset, NLP, NLI, semantic similarity, stance detection

TL;DR: COVIDLies, a dataset for detecting COVID-19 misinformation on social media and evaluation of existing NLP models.

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 (https://ucinlp.github.io/covid19 ), a dataset of 6761 expert-annotated tweets to evaluate the performance of misinformation detection systems on 86 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.