Team Alex at CLEF CheckThat! 2020: Identifying Check-Worthy Tweets With Transformer Models

Understand

While misinformation and disinformation have been thriving in social media for years, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the health misinformation merged, thus elevating the problem to a whole new level and giving rise to the first global infodemic.

• The fight against this infodemic has many aspects, with fact-checking and debunking false and misleading claims being among the most important ones.
• Unfortunately, manual fact-checking is time-consuming and automatic fact-checking is resource-intense, which means that we need to pre-filter the input social media posts and to throw out those that do not appear to be check-worthy.
• With this in mind, here we propose a model for detecting check-worthy tweets about COVID-19, which combines deep contextualized text representations with modeling the social context of the tweet.