A two-stage framework for Arabic social media text misinformation detection combining data augmentation and AraBERT

Abstract

Misinformation can profoundly impact the reputation of an entity, and eliminating its spread has become a critical concern across various applications. Social media, often a primary source of information, can significantly influence individuals’ perspectives through content from less credible sources. The utilization of machine-learning (ML) algorithms can facilitate automated, large-scale analysis of textual content, contributing to the rapid and efficient processing of extensive datasets for informed decision-making. Since the performance of ML models is highly affected by the size of the training data, many research papers have presented different approaches to solve the problem of limited dataset size. The data augmentation (DA) approach is one of these strategies, aiming to enhance ML model performance by increasing the amount of training data. DA generates new instances by applying different transformations to the original data instances. While many DA techniques have been investigated for various languages, such as English, achieving an enhancement of the classification model’s performance on the new augmented dataset compared to the original dataset, there is a lack of studies on the Arabic language due to its unique characteristics. This paper introduces a novel two-stage framework designed for the automated identification of misinformation in Arabic textual content. The first stage aims to identify the optimal representation of features before feeding them to the ML model. Diverse representations of tweet content are explored, including N-grams, content-based features, and source-based features. The second stage focuses on investigating the DA effect through the back-translation technique applied to the original training data. Back-translation entails translating sentences from the target language (in this case, Arabic) into another language and then back to Arabic. As a result of this procedure, new examples for training are created by introducing variances in the text. The study utilizes support vector machine (SVM), naive Bayes, logistic regression (LR), and random forest (RF) as baseline algorithms. Additionally, AraBERT transformer pre-trained language models are used to relate the instance’s label and feature representation of the input. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that misinformation detection, coupled with data augmentation, enhances accuracy by a noteworthy margin 5 to 12% compared to baseline machine-learning algorithms and pre-trained models. Remarkably, the results show the superiority of the N-grams approach over traditional state-of-the-art feature representations concerning accuracy, recall, precision, and F-measure metrics. This suggests a promising avenue for improving the efficacy of misinformation detection mechanisms in the realm of Arabic text analysis.