Classifying COVID-19 vaccine narratives

Abstract: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite governments' information campaigns and WHO efforts. One of the reasons behind this is vaccine disinformation which widely spreads in social media. In particular, recent surveys have established that vaccine disinformation is impacting negatively citizen trust in COVID-19 vaccination. At the same time, fact-checkers are struggling with detecting and tracking of vaccine disinformation, due to the large scale of social media. To assist fact-checkers in monitoring vaccine narratives online, this paper studies a new vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.