{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/eating-garlic-prevents-covid-19-infection","title":"Eating Garlic Prevents COVID-19 Infection: Detecting Misinformation on the Arabic Content of Twitter","arxiv_id":"2101.05626","date":"2021-01-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sarah Alqurashi","Btool Hamoui","Abdulaziz Alashaikh","Ahmad Alhindi","Eisa Alanazi"],"abstract":"The rapid growth of social media content during the current pandemic provides useful tools for disseminating information which has also become a root for misinformation. Therefore, there is an urgent need for fact-checking and effective techniques for detecting misinformation in social media. In this work, we study the misinformation in the Arabic content of Twitter. We construct a large Arabic dataset related to COVID-19 misinformation and gold-annotate the tweets into two categories: misinformation or not. Then, we apply eight different traditional and deep machine learning models, with different features including word embeddings and word frequency. The word embedding models (\\textsc{FastText} and word2vec) exploit more than two million Arabic tweets related to COVID-19. Experiments show that optimizing the area under the curve (AUC) improves the models' performance and the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) presents the highest accuracy in detecting COVID-19 misinformation online.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05626v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.05626v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"eating-garlic-prevents-covid-19-infection","repo_url":"https://github.com/SarahAlqurashi/COVID19-Misinformation-dataset-","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"eating-garlic-prevents-covid-19-infection","repo_url":"https://github.com/BatoolHamawi/COVID-19WordEmbeddings","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"fact-checking","task_name":"Fact Checking"},{"task_slug":"misinformation","task_name":"Misinformation"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}