This paper details a system designed for Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) Shared Task 2020. We specifically describe the systems designed to solve task 2: Automatic classification of multilingual tweets that report adverse effects, and task 3: Automatic extraction and normalization of adverse effects in English tweets. Fine tuning RoBERTa large for classifying English tweets enables us to achieve a F1 score of 56%, which is an increase of +10% compared to the average F1 score for all the submissions. Using BERT based NER and question answering, we are able to achieve a F1 score of 57.6% for extracting adverse reaction mentions from tweets, which is an increase of +1.2% compared to the average F1 score for all the submissions.

We propose a novel, attention-based self-supervised approach to identify “claim-worthy” sentences in a fake news article, an important first step in automated fact-checking. We leverage aboutness of headline and content using attention mechanism for this task. The identified claims can be used for downstream task of claim verification for which we are releasing a benchmark dataset of manually selected compelling articles with veracity labels and associated evidence. This work goes beyond stylistic analysis to identifying content that influences reader belief. Experiments with three datasets show the strength of our model.

Popular fake news articles spread faster than mainstream articles on the same topic which renders manual fact checking inefficient. At the same time, creating tools for automatic detection is as challenging due to lack of dataset containing articles which present fake or manipulated stories as compelling facts. In this paper, we introduce manually verified corpus of compelling fake and questionable news articles on the USA politics, containing around 700 articles from Aug-Nov, 2016. We present various analyses on this corpus and finally implement classification model based on linguistic features. This work is still in progress as we plan to extend the dataset in the future and use it for our approach towards automated fake news detection.

Social media platforms play a crucial role in piecing together global news stories via their corresponding online discussions. Thus, in this work, we introduce the problem of automatically summarizing massively multilingual microblog text streams. We discuss the challenges involved in both generating summaries as well as evaluating them. We introduce a simple word graph based approach that utilizes node neighborhoods to identify keyphrases and thus in turn, pick summary candidates. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating precise summaries as compared to other popular techniques.

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) are crucial lexico-semantic units in any language. However, most work on MWEs has been focused on standard monolingual corpora. In this work, we examine MWE usage on Twitter - an inherently multilingual medium with an extremely short average text length that is often replete with grammatical errors. In this work we present a new graph based, language agnostic method for automatically extracting MWEs from tweets. We show how our method outperforms standard Association Measures. We also present a novel unsupervised evaluation technique to ascertain the accuracy of MWE extraction.