Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an 'infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We perform a binary classification task (real vs fake) and benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines -Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.32% F1-score with SVM on the test set. The data and code is available at: https://github.com/parthpatwa/covid19-fake-news-dectection.

Multi-modal sentiment analysis offers various challenges, one being the effective combination of different input modalities, namely text, visual and acoustic. In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network based multi-modal attention framework that leverages the contextual information for utterance-level sentiment prediction. The proposed approach applies attention on multi-modal multi-utterance representations and tries to learn the contributing features amongst them. We evaluate our proposed approach on two multi-modal sentiment analysis benchmark datasets, viz. CMU Multi-modal Opinion-level Sentiment Intensity (CMU-MOSI) corpus and the recently released CMU Multi-modal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity (CMU-MOSEI) corpus. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with the accuracies of 82.31% and 79.80% for the MOSI and MO-SEI datasets, respectively. These are approximately 2 and 1 points performance improvement over the state-of-the-art models for the datasets.

Sentiment analysis has immense implications in modern businesses through user-feedback mining. Large product-based enterprises like Samsung and Apple make crucial business decisions based on the large quantity of user reviews and suggestions available in different e-commerce websites and social media platforms like Amazon and Facebook. Sentiment analysis caters to these needs by summarizing user sentiment behind a particular object. In this paper, we present a novel approach of incorporating the neighboring aspects related information into the sentiment classification of the target aspect using memory networks. Our method outperforms the state of the art by 1.6% on average in two distinct domains.

E motions and sentiments are subjective in nature. They differ on a case-to-case basis. However, predicting only the emotion and sentiment does not always convey complete information. The degree or level of emotions and sentiments often plays a crucial role in understanding the exact feeling within a single class (e.g., 'good' versus 'awesome'). In this paper, we propose a stacked ensemble method for predicting the degree of intensity for emotion and sentiment by combining the outputs obtained from several deep learning and classical feature-based models using a multi-layer perceptron network. We develop three deep learning models based on convolutional neural network, long short-term memory and gated recurrent unit and one classical supervised model based on support vector regression. We evaluate our proposed technique for two problems, i.e., emotion analysis in the generic domain and sentiment analysis in the financial domain. The proposed model shows impressive results for both the problems. Comparisons show that our proposed model achieves improved performance over the existing state-of-theart systems.

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Internet memes have become powerful means to transmit political, psychological, and sociocultural ideas. Although memes are typically humorous, recent days have witnessed an escalation of harmful memes used for trolling, cyberbullying, and abuse. Detecting such memes is challenging as they can be highly satirical and cryptic. Moreover, while previous work has focused on specific aspects of memes such as hate speech and propaganda, there has been little work on harm in general. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We focus on two tasks: (i) detecting harmful memes, and (ii) identifying the social entities they target. We further extend a recently released HarMeme dataset, which covered COVID-19, with additional memes and a new topic: US politics. To solve these tasks, we propose MOMENTA (MultimOdal framework for detecting harmful MemEs aNd Their tArgets), a novel multimodal deep neural network that uses global and local perspectives to detect harmful memes. MOMENTA systematically analyzes the local and the global perspective of the input meme (in both modalities) and relates it to the background context. MOMENTA is interpretable and generalizable, and our experiments show that it outperforms several strong rivaling approaches. * denotes equal contribution (a) Partially harmful meme. (b) Very harmful meme.

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Related tasks often have inter-dependence on each other and perform better when solved in a joint framework. In this paper, we present a deep multi-task learning framework that jointly performs sentiment and emotion analysis both. The multi-modal inputs (i.e., text, acoustic and visual frames) of a video convey diverse and distinctive information, and usually do not have equal contribution in the decision making. We propose a contextlevel inter-modal attention framework for simultaneously predicting the sentiment and expressed emotions of an utterance. We evaluate our proposed approach on CMU-MOSEI dataset for multi-modal sentiment and emotion analysis. Evaluation results suggest that multitask learning framework offers improvement over the single-task framework. The proposed approach reports new state-of-the-art performance for both sentiment analysis and emotion analysis.