HC-COVID

Abstract

The proliferation of social media has promoted the spread of misinformation that raises many concerns in our society. This paper focuses on a critical problem of explainable COVID-19 misinformation detection that aims to accurately identify and explain misleading COVID-19 claims on social media. Motivated by the lack of COVID-19 relevant knowledge in existing solutions, we construct a novel crowdsource knowledge graph based approach to incorporate the COVID-19 knowledge facts by leveraging the collaborative efforts of expert and non-expert crowd workers. Two important challenges exist in developing our solution: i) how to effectively coordinate the crowd efforts from both expert and non-expert workers to generate the relevant knowledge facts for detecting COVID-19 misinformation; ii) How to leverage the knowledge facts from the constructed knowledge graph to accurately explain the detected COVID-19 misinformation. To address the above challenges, we develop HC-COVID, a hierarchical crowdsource knowledge graph based framework that explicitly models the COVID-19 knowledge facts contributed by crowd workers with different levels of expertise and accurately identifies the related knowledge facts to explain the detection results. We evaluate HC-COVID using two public real-world datasets on social media. Evaluation results demonstrate that HC-COVID significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of the detection accuracy of misleading COVID-19 claims and the quality of the explanations.