R00 at NLP4IF-2021 Fighting COVID-19 Infodemic with Transformers and More Transformers

This paper describes the winning model in the Arabic NLP4IF shared task for fighting the COVID-19 infodemic. The goal of the shared task is to check disinformation about COVID-19 in Arabic tweets. Our proposed model has been ranked 1st with an F1-Score of 0.780 and an Accuracy score of 0.762. A variety of transformer-based pre-trained language models have been experimented with through this study. The best-scored model is an ensemble of AraBERT-Base, Asafya-BERT, and ARBERT models. One of the study’s key findings is showing the effect the pre-processing can have on every model’s score. In addition to describing the winning model, the current study shows the error analysis.