Attention Mechanism Based on a Pre-trained Model for Improving Arabic Fake News Predictions

Abstract

Social media and news agencies are major sources for tracking news and events. With these sources' massive amounts of data, it is easy to spread false or misleading information. Given the great dangers of fake news to societies, previous studies have given great attention to detecting it and limiting its impact. As such, this work aims to use modern deep learning techniques to detect Arabic fake news. In the proposed system, the attention model is adapted with bidirectional long-short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) to identify the most informative words in the sentence. Then, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is applied to classify news articles as fake or real. The experiments are conducted on a newly launched Arabic dataset called the Arabic Fake News Dataset (AFND). The AFDN dataset contains exactly 606912 news articles collected from multiple sources, so it is suitable for deep learning requirements. Both simple recurrent neural networks (S-RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRU) are used for comparison. According to evaluation criteria, our proposed model achieved an accuracy of (0.8127), which is the best and highest accuracy among the deep learning methods used in this work. Moreover, the performance of our proposed model is better compared to previous studies, which used the AFND.