AraCovTexFinder: Leveraging the transformer-based language model for Arabic COVID-19 text identification
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of the pandemic, the identification and processing of COVID-19-related text have emerged as critical research areas within the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With a growing reliance on online portals and social media for information exchange and interaction, a surge in online textual content, comprising disinformation, misinformation, fake news, and rumors has led to the phenomenon of an infodemic on the World Wide Web. Arabic, spoken by over 420 million people worldwide, stands as a significant low-resource language, lacking efficient tools or applications for the detection of COVID-19-related text. Additionally, the identification of COVID-19 text is an essential prerequisite task for detecting fake and toxic content associated with COVID-19. This gap hampers crucial COVID information retrieval and processing necessary for policymakers and health authorities. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces an intelligent Arabic COVID-19 text identification system named ‘AraCovTexFinder,’ leveraging a fine-tuned fusion-based transformer model. Recognizing the challenges posed by a scarcity of related text corpora, substantial morphological variations in the language, and a deficiency of well-tuned hyperparameters, the proposed system aims to mitigate these hurdles. To support the proposed method, two corpora are developed: an Arabic embedding corpus (AraEC) and an Arabic COVID-19 text identification corpus (AraCoV). The study evaluates the performance of six transformer-based language models (mBERT, XML-RoBERTa, mDeBERTa-V3, mDistilBERT, BERT-Arabic, and AraBERT), 12 deep learning models (combining Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText embedding with CNN, LSTM, VDCNN, and BiLSTM), and the newly introduced model AraCovTexFinder. Through extensive evaluation, AraCovTexFinder achieves a high accuracy of 98.89 ± 0.001%, outperforming other baseline models, including transformer-based language and deep learning models. This research highlights the importance of specialized tools in low-resource languages to combat the infodemic relating to COVID-19, which can assist policymakers and health authorities in making informed decisions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it