Fake News Detection in Hausa Language Using Transfer Learning Method

Abstract

Fake news poses a significant threat to societies worldwide, including in Hausa-speaking regions, where misinformation is rapidly disseminated via social media. The lack of NLP resources tailored to this language exacerbated the problem of fake news in the Hausa language. While extensive research has been conducted on counterfeit news detection in languages such as English, little attention has been paid to languages like Hausa, leaving a significant portion of the global population vulnerable to misinformation. Traditional machine-learning approaches often fail to perform well in low-resource settings due to insufficient training data and linguistic resources. This study aims to develop a robust model for detecting fake news in the Hausa language by leveraging transfer learning techniques with adaptive fine-tuning. A dataset of over 6,600 news articles, including both fake and truthful articles, was collected from various sources between January 2022 and December 2023. Cross-lingual transfer Learning (XLT) was employed to adapt pre- trained models for the low-resource Hausa language. The model was fine-tuned and evaluated using performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, AUC-ROC, and PR curves. Results demonstrated a high accuracy rate in identifying fake news, with significant improvements in detecting misinformation within political and world news categories. This study addresses the gap in Hausa- language natural language processing (NLP) and contributes to the fight against misinformation in Nigeria. The findings are relevant for developing AI- driven tools to curb fake news dissemination in African languages.