Cross-SEAN: A cross-stitch semi-supervised neural attention model for COVID-19 fake news detection

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the world, it has been accompanied by a tsunami of fake news and misinformation on social media. At the time when reliable information is vital for public health and safety, COVID-19 related fake news has been spreading even faster than the facts. During times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, fake news can not only cause intellectual confusion but can also place people’s lives at risk. This calls for an immediate need to contain the spread of such misinformation on social media. We introduce CTF, a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter dataset with labelled genuine and fake tweets. Additionally, we propose Cross-SEAN, a cross-stitch based semi-supervised end-to-end neural attention model which leverages the large amount of unlabelled data. Cross-SEAN partially generalises to emerging fake news as it learns from relevant external knowledge. We compare Cross-SEAN with seven state-of-the-art fake news detection methods. We observe that it achieves 0.95 F1 Score on CTF, outperforming the best baseline by 9%. We also develop Chrome-SEAN, a Cross-SEAN based chrome extension for real-time detection of fake tweets. •CTF, a labelled COVID-19 misinformation dataset.•Cross-SEAN, a new model to curb COVID-19 fake news on Twitter. It is one of the few semi-supervised models introduced for the task of fake news detection.•Detailed analysis of the dataset to unfold the underlying patterns of the COVID-19 related fake tweets.•Chrome-SEAN, a real-world tool (chrome extension) to flag COVID-19 fake news on Twitter.