Classification Aware Neural Topic Model and its Application on a New COVID-19 Disinformation Corpus

Understand

The explosion of disinformation accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic has overloaded fact-checkers and media worldwide, and brought a new major challenge to government responses worldwide.

• Not only is disinformation creating confusion about medical science amongst citizens, but it is also amplifying distrust in policy makers and governments.
• To help tackle this, we developed computational methods to categorise COVID-19 disinformation.
• The COVID-19 disinformation categories could be used for a) focusing fact-checking efforts on the most damaging kinds of COVID-19 disinformation; b) guiding policy makers who are trying to deliver effective public health messages and counter effectively COVID-19 disinformation.