The massive spread of false information on social media has become a global risk especially in a global pandemic situation like COVID-19. False information detection has thus become a surging research topic in recent months. In recent years, supervis
ed machine learning models have been used to automatically identify false information in social media. However, most of these machine learning models focus only on the language they were trained on. Given the fact that social media platforms are being used in different languages, managing machine learning models for each and every language separately would be chaotic. In this research, we experiment with multilingual models to identify false information in social media by using two recently released multilingual false information detection datasets. We show that multilingual models perform on par with the monolingual models and sometimes even better than the monolingual models to detect false information in social media making them more useful in real-world scenarios.
Since a lexicon-based approach is more elegant scientifically, explaining the solution components and being easier to generalize to other applications, this paper provides a new approach for offensive language and hate speech detection on social medi
a, which embodies a lexicon of implicit and explicit offensive and swearing expressions annotated with contextual information. Due to the severity of the social media abusive comments in Brazil, and the lack of research in Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese is the language used to validate the models. Nevertheless, our method may be applied to any other language. The conducted experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, outperforming the current baseline methods for the Portuguese language.
