Findings of the NLP4IF-2021 Shared Tasks on Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic and Censorship Detection

Shaden Shaar, Firoj Alam, Giovanni Da San Martino, Alex Nikolov, Wajdi Zaghouani, Preslav Nakov, Anna Feldman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present the results and the main findings of the NLP4IF-2021 shared tasks. Task 1 focused on fighting the COVID-19 infodemic in social media, and it was offered in Arabic, Bulgarian, and English. Given a tweet, it asked to predict whether that tweet contains a verifiable claim, and if so, whether it is likely to be false, is of general interest, is likely to be harmful, and is worthy of manual fact-checking; also, whether it is harmful to society, and whether it requires the attention of policy makers. Task 2 focused on censorship detection, and was offered in Chinese. A total of ten teams submitted systems for task 1, and one team participated in task 2; nine teams also submitted a system description paper. Here, we present the tasks, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. Most submissions achieved sizable improvements over several baselines, and the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles. The data, the scorers and the leader-boards for the tasks are available at http://gitlab.com/NLP4IF/nlp4if-2021.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNLP4IF 2021 - NLP for Internet Freedom
Subtitle of host publicationCensorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop
EditorsAnna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages82-92
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085268
StatePublished - 2021
Event4th Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, NLP4IF 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 6 Jun 2021 → …

Publication series

NameNLP4IF 2021 - NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop

Conference

Conference4th Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, NLP4IF 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/06/21 → …

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