Applications of machine learning for COVID-19 misinformation: a systematic review

The inflammable growth of misinformation on social media and other platforms during pandemic situations like COVID-19 can cause significant damage to the physical and mental stability of the people. To detect such misinformation, researchers have been applying various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. The objective of this study is to systematically review, assess, and synthesize state-of-the-art research articles that have used different ML and DL techniques to detect COVID-19 misinformation. A structured literature search was conducted in the relevant bibliographic databases to ensure that the survey was solely centered on reproducible and high-quality research. We reviewed 43 papers that fulfilled our inclusion criteria out of 260 articles found from our keyword search. We have surveyed a complete pipeline of COVID-19 misinformation detection. In particular, we have identified various COVID-19 misinformation datasets and reviewed different data processing, feature extraction, and classification techniques to detect COVID-19 misinformation. In the end, the challenges and limitations in detecting COVID-19 misinformation using ML techniques and the future research directions are discussed.