No Arabic abstract
Fake news are nowadays an issue of pressing concern, given their recent rise as a potential threat to high-quality journalism and well-informed public discourse. The Fake News Challenge (FNC-1) was organized in 2017 to encourage the development of machine learning-based classification systems for stance detection (i.e., for identifying whether a particular news article agrees, disagrees, discusses, or is unrelated to a particular news headline), thus helping in the detection and analysis of possible instances of fake news. This article presents a new approach to tackle this stance detection problem, based on the combination of string similarity features with a deep neural architecture that leverages ideas previously advanced in the context of learning efficient text representations, document classification, and natural language inference. Specifically, we use bi-directional Recurrent Neural Networks, together with max-pooling over the temporal/sequential dimension and neural attention, for representing (i) the headline, (ii) the first two sentences of the news article, and (iii) the entire news article. These representations are then combined/compared, complemented with similarity features inspired on other FNC-1 approaches, and passed to a final layer that predicts the stance of the article towards the headline. We also explore the use of external sources of information, specifically large datasets of sentence pairs originally proposed for training and evaluating natural language inference methods, in order to pre-train specific components of the neural network architecture (e.g., the RNNs used for encoding sentences). The obtained results attest to the effectiveness of the proposed ideas and show that our model, particularly when considering pre-training and the combination of neural representations together with similarity features, slightly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.
The rapid advancement of technology in online communication via social media platforms has led to a prolific rise in the spread of misinformation and fake news. Fake news is especially rampant in the current COVID-19 pandemic, leading to people believing in false and potentially harmful claims and stories. Detecting fake news quickly can alleviate the spread of panic, chaos and potential health hazards. We developed a two stage automated pipeline for COVID-19 fake news detection using state of the art machine learning models for natural language processing. The first model leverages a novel fact checking algorithm that retrieves the most relevant facts concerning user claims about particular COVID-19 claims. The second model verifies the level of truth in the claim by computing the textual entailment between the claim and the true facts retrieved from a manually curated COVID-19 dataset. The dataset is based on a publicly available knowledge source consisting of more than 5000 COVID-19 false claims and verified explanations, a subset of which was internally annotated and cross-validated to train and evaluate our models. We evaluate a series of models based on classical text-based features to more contextual Transformer based models and observe that a model pipeline based on BERT and ALBERT for the two stages respectively yields the best results.
The topic of fake news has drawn attention both from the public and the academic communities. Such misinformation has the potential of affecting public opinion, providing an opportunity for malicious parties to manipulate the outcomes of public events such as elections. Because such high stakes are at play, automatically detecting fake news is an important, yet challenging problem that is not yet well understood. Nevertheless, there are three generally agreed upon characteristics of fake news: the text of an article, the user response it receives, and the source users promoting it. Existing work has largely focused on tailoring solutions to one particular characteristic which has limited their success and generality. In this work, we propose a model that combines all three characteristics for a more accurate and automated prediction. Specifically, we incorporate the behavior of both parties, users and articles, and the group behavior of users who propagate fake news. Motivated by the three characteristics, we propose a model called CSI which is composed of three modules: Capture, Score, and Integrate. The first module is based on the response and text; it uses a Recurrent Neural Network to capture the temporal pattern of user activity on a given article. The second module learns the source characteristic based on the behavior of users, and the two are integrated with the third module to classify an article as fake or not. Experimental analysis on real-world data demonstrates that CSI achieves higher accuracy than existing models, and extracts meaningful latent representations of both users and articles.
The proliferation of fake news and its propagation on social media has become a major concern due to its ability to create devastating impacts. Different machine learning approaches have been suggested to detect fake news. However, most of those focused on a specific type of news (such as political) which leads us to the question of dataset-bias of the models used. In this research, we conducted a benchmark study to assess the performance of different applicable machine learning approaches on three different datasets where we accumulated the largest and most diversified one. We explored a number of advanced pre-trained language models for fake news detection along with the traditional and deep learning ones and compared their performances from different aspects for the first time to the best of our knowledge. We find that BERT and similar pre-trained models perform the best for fake news detection, especially with very small dataset. Hence, these models are significantly better option for languages with limited electronic contents, i.e., training data. We also carried out several analysis based on the models performance, articles topic, articles length, and discussed different lessons learned from them. We believe that this benchmark study will help the research community to explore further and news sites/blogs to select the most appropriate fake news detection method.
With the rapid evolution of social media, fake news has become a significant social problem, which cannot be addressed in a timely manner using manual investigation. This has motivated numerous studies on automating fake news detection. Most studies explore supervised training models with different modalities (e.g., text, images, and propagation networks) of news records to identify fake news. However, the performance of such techniques generally drops if news records are coming from different domains (e.g., politics, entertainment), especially for domains that are unseen or rarely-seen during training. As motivation, we empirically show that news records from different domains have significantly different word usage and propagation patterns. Furthermore, due to the sheer volume of unlabelled news records, it is challenging to select news records for manual labelling so that the domain-coverage of the labelled dataset is maximized. Hence, this work: (1) proposes a novel framework that jointly preserves domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge in news records to detect fake news from different domains; and (2) introduces an unsupervised technique to select a set of unlabelled informative news records for manual labelling, which can be ultimately used to train a fake news detection model that performs well for many domains while minimizing the labelling cost. Our experiments show that the integration of the proposed fake news model and the selective annotation approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for cross-domain news datasets, while yielding notable improvements for rarely-appearing domains in news datasets.
Effective detection of fake news has recently attracted significant attention. Current studies have made significant contributions to predicting fake news with less focus on exploiting the relationship (similarity) between the textual and visual information in news articles. Attaching importance to such similarity helps identify fake news stories that, for example, attempt to use irrelevant images to attract readers attention. In this work, we propose a $mathsf{S}$imilarity-$mathsf{A}$ware $mathsf{F}$ak$mathsf{E}$ news detection method ($mathsf{SAFE}$) which investigates multi-modal (textual and visual) information of news articles. First, neural networks are adopted to separately extract textual and visual features for news representation. We further investigate the relationship between the extracted features across modalities. Such representations of news textual and visual information along with their relationship are jointly learned and used to predict fake news. The proposed method facilitates recognizing the falsity of news articles based on their text, images, or their mismatches. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale real-world data, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.