This paper describes the current milestones achieved in our ongoing project that aims to understand the surveillance of, impact of and intervention on COVID-19 misinfodemic on Twitter. Specifically, it introduces a public dashboard which, in addition to displaying case counts in an interactive map and a navigational panel, also provides some unique features not found in other places. Particularly, the dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVID-19 related facts and debunks of misinformation, and it displays the most prevalent information from the catalog among Twitter users in user-selected U.S. geographic regions. The paper explains how to use BERT models to match tweets with the facts and misinformation and to detect their stance towards such information. The paper also discusses the results of preliminary experiments on analyzing the spatio-temporal spread of misinformation.

We introduce Tanbih, a news aggregator with intelligent analysis tools to help readers understanding what’s behind a news story. Our system displays news grouped into events and generates media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, and stance with respect to various claims and topics of a news outlet. In addition, we automatically analyse each article to detect whether it is propagandistic and to determine its stance with respect to a number of controversial topics.

We present ClaimRank, an online system for detecting check-worthy claims. While originally trained on political debates, the system can work for any kind of text, e.g., interviews or just regular news articles. Its aim is to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. ClaimRank supports both Arabic and English, it is trained on actual annotations from nine reputable fact-checking organizations (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post), and thus it can mimic the claim selection strategies for each and any of them, as well as for the union of them all.

We address the problem of cross-language adaptation for question-question similarity reranking in community question answering, with the objective to port a system trained on one input language to another input language given labeled training data for the first language and only unlabeled data for the second language. In particular, we propose to use adversarial training of neural networks to learn high-level features that are discriminative for the main learning task, and at the same time are invariant across the input languages. The evaluation results show sizable improvements for our cross-language adversarial neural network (CLANN) model over a strong non-adversarial system.