Version 1
: Received: 17 June 2021 / Approved: 18 June 2021 / Online: 18 June 2021 (14:48:31 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 11 July 2021 / Approved: 12 July 2021 / Online: 12 July 2021 (11:58:57 CEST)
Version 3
: Received: 24 July 2021 / Approved: 26 July 2021 / Online: 26 July 2021 (12:06:04 CEST)
Abdeen, M.A.R.; Hamed, A.A.; Wu, X. Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in News Articles and False Publications: The NeoNet Text Classifier, a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm. Appl. Sci.2021, 11, 7265.
Abdeen, M.A.R.; Hamed, A.A.; Wu, X. Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in News Articles and False Publications: The NeoNet Text Classifier, a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 7265.
Abdeen, M.A.R.; Hamed, A.A.; Wu, X. Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in News Articles and False Publications: The NeoNet Text Classifier, a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm. Appl. Sci.2021, 11, 7265.
Abdeen, M.A.R.; Hamed, A.A.; Wu, X. Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in News Articles and False Publications: The NeoNet Text Classifier, a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 7265.
Abstract
The spread of the Coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic. The false information that is embedded in the infodemic affects people’s ability to have access to safety and follow proper procedures to mitigate the risks. Here, we present a novel supervised machine learning text mining algorithm that analyzes the content of a given news article and assign a label to it. The NeoNet algorithm is trained by noun-phrases features which contributes a network model. The algorithm was tested on a real-world dataset and predicted the label of never-seem articles and flags ones that are suspicious or disputed. In five different fold comparisons, NeoNet surpassed prominent contemporary algorithm such as Neural Networks, SVM, and Random Forests. The analysis shows that the NeoNet algorithm predicts a label of an article with a 100% precision using a non-pruned model. This highlights the promise of detecting disputed online contents that may contribute negatively to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, using machine learning combined with powerful text mining and network science provide the necessary tools to counter the spread of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories that is associated with the COVID19 Infodemic.
Keywords
COVID-19 Infodemic; Text Classification; Noun-phrases Networks; Supervised Learning.
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Algebra and Number Theory
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
