Identifying Misinformation on YouTube through Transcript Contextual
  Analysis with Transformer Models
Christos Christodoulou Nikos Salamanos Pantelitsa Leonidou Michail Papadakis Michael Sirivianos
Misinformation on YouTube is a significant concern, necessitating robust
detection strategies. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology for video
classification, focusing on the veracity of the content. We convert the
conventional video classification task into a text classification task by
leveraging the textual content derived from the video transcripts. We employ
advanced machine learning techniques like transfer learning to solve the
classification challenge. Our approach incorporates two forms of transfer
learning: (a) fine-tuning base transformer models such as BERT, RoBERTa, and
ELECTRA, and (b) few-shot learning using sentence-transformers MPNet and
RoBERTa-large. We apply the trained models to three datasets: (a) YouTube
Vaccine-misinformation related videos, (b) YouTube Pseudoscience videos, and
(c) Fake-News dataset (a collection of articles). Including the Fake-News
dataset extended the evaluation of our approach beyond YouTube videos. Using
these datasets, we evaluated the models distinguishing valid information from
misinformation. The fine-tuned models yielded Matthews Correlation
Coefficient>0.81, accuracy>0.90, and F1 score>0.90 in two of three datasets.
Interestingly, the few-shot models outperformed the fine-tuned ones by 20% in
both Accuracy and F1 score for the YouTube Pseudoscience dataset, highlighting
the potential utility of this approach -- especially in the context of limited
training data.