Fake News Classification Research Articles

A transformer-based architecture for fake news classification

In today’s post-truth world, the proliferation of propaganda and falsified news poses a deadly risk of misinforming the public on a variety of issues, either through traditional media or on social media. Information people acquire through these articles and posts tends to shape their world view and provides reasoning for choices they take in their day to day lives. Thus, fake news can definitely be a malicious force, having massive real-world consequences. In this paper, we focus on classifying fake news using models based on a natural language processing framework, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, also known as BERT. We fine-tune BERT for specific domain datasets and also make use of human justification and metadata for added performance in our models. We determine that the deep-contextualizing nature of BERT is effective for this task and obtain significant improvement over binary classification, and minimal yet important improvement in six-label classification in comparison with previously explored models.

A temporal ensembling based semi-supervised ConvNet for the detection of fake news articles

Internet-based information circulation has given rise to the proliferation of fake and misleading contents, which has extreme hostile effects on individuals and humanity. Supervised artificial intelligence techniques require a huge amount of annotated data which is a time-consuming, expensive and laborious task as the speed and volume of social media news generation is very high. To counter this situation, we propose an innovative Convolutional Neural Network semi-supervised framework built on the self-ensembling concept to take leverage of the linguistic and stylometric information of annotated news articles, at the same time explore the hidden patterns in unlabelled data as well. Self-ensembling provides consensus predictions of the labels of unannotated data using previous epochs outputs of network-in-training. These accumulated ensemble predictions are supposed to be a better predictor for the unknown labels than the output of most recent training epoch, thus suitable to be used as a proxy for the labels of unannotated data. The uniqueness of the framework is that it ensembles all the outputs of previous training epochs of the neural network to use them as an unsupervised target for comparing them with current output prediction of unlabelled articles. The framework is validated with extensive experiments on three datasets for different proportions of labelled and unlabelled data. It can achieve highest 97.45% fake news classification accuracy using 50% labelled articles on Fake News Data Kaggle dataset. Contemporary baseline methods are placed in juxtaposition with the proposed architecture which demonstrates the robustness of our work compared to the state-of-the-art.

Fake news detection: A hybrid CNN-RNN based deep learning approach

The explosion of social media allowed individuals to spread information without cost, with little investigation and fewer filters than before. This amplified the old problem of fake news, which became a major concern nowadays due to the negative impact it brings to the communities. In order to tackle the rise and spreading of fake news, automatic detection techniques have been researched building on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The recent achievements of deep learning techniques in complex natural language processing tasks, make them a promising solution for fake news detection too. This work proposes a novel hybrid deep learning model that combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks for fake news classification. The model was successfully validated on two fake news datasets (ISO and FA-KES), achieving detection results that are significantly better than other non-hybrid baseline methods. Further experiments on the generalization of the proposed model across different datasets, had promising results.

Complex Network and Source Inspired COVID-19 Fake News Classification on Twitter

In COVID-19 related infodemic, social media becomes a medium for wrongdoers to spread rumors, fake news, hoaxes, conspiracies, astroturf memes, clickbait, satire, smear campaigns, and other forms of deception. It puts a tremendous strain on society by damaging reputation, public trust, freedom of expression, journalism, justice, truth, and democracy. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to detect and contain unreliable information. Multiple techniques have been proposed to detect fake news propagation in tweets based on tweets content, propagation on the network of users, and the profile of the news generators. Generating human-like content allows deceiving content-based methods. Network-based methods rely on the complete graph to detect fake news, resulting in late detection. User profile-based techniques are effective for bots or fake accounts detection. However, they are not suited to detect fake news from original accounts. To deal with the shortcomings in existing methods, we introduce a source-based method focusing on the news propagators’ community, including posters and re-tweeters to detect such contents. Propagators are connected using follower-following relations. A feature set combining the connectivity patterns of news propagators with their profile features is used in a machine learning framework to perform binary classification of tweets. Complex network measures and user profile features are also examined separately. We perform an extensive comparative analysis of the proposed methodology on a real-world COVID-19 dataset, exploiting various machine learning and deep learning models at the community and node levels. Results show that hybrid features perform better than network features and user features alone. Further optimization demonstrates that Ensemble’s boosting model CATBoost and deep learning model RNN are the most effective, with an AUC score of 98%. Furthermore, preliminary results show that the proposed solution can also handle fake news in the political and entertainment domain using a small training set.

Typology of Business-Related Fake News Online: A Literature Review

Objective – This review paper discusses the emergence of scholarly articles related to the typology and classification of fake news and offers solutions for identified gaps, such as unstandardized terminology and unstandardized typology in the field of fake news-related research. Typology of fake news is a critical topic nowadays: recently emerged fake news needs to be categorized and analyzed in a structured manner in order to respond appropriately. Methodology/Technique – Based on the systematic review of literature identified in scientific databases, different typologies of fake news have been identified and a new typology of business-related fake news online has been proposed. New typology of business-related fake news online is based on factors such as level of facticity, intention to deceive and financial motivation. Findings and novelty – Content analysis of 326 articles containing terms related to the typology of fake news and classification of fake news indicates that the term “typology of fake news” is predominantly used in management, marketing and communications research, while the term “classification of fake news” is predominantly used in the information technology research. The content analysis also indicates the recent emergence of the topic of typology and classification of fake news in academic research, revealing that all articles related to these topics have been published on or after 2016. In addition to the contribution by presenting comprehensive typology of business-related fake news online, this paper also provides recommendations for future research and improvements related to the typology of fake news, emphasizing business-related fake news and fake news spread in the digital space. Type of Paper: Review JEL Classification: M31, M39. Keywords: Fake News; Crisis Communications; Online Communications; Digital Marketing; Management Research; Marketing Research Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Selakovic, M; Tarabasz, A; Gallant, M. (2020). Typology of Business-Related Fake News Online: A Literature Review, J. Mgt. Mkt. Review 5(4) 234 – 243. https://doi.org/10.35609/jmmr.2020.5.4(5)

Fake News Classification Using Random Forest and Decision Tree (J48)

FakeNews is one of the most popular phenomena that have considerable effects on our social life, especially in the political domain. Nowadays, creating fake news becomes very easy because of users' widespread using the internet and social media. Therefore, the detection of elusiveness news is a crucial problem that needs to be considerable mainly because of its challenges like the limited amount of the benchmark datasets and the amount of the published news every second. This research proposed utilizing two different machine learning algorithms (random forest and decision tree (J48)) to detect the fake news. In this paper, the full dataset size equals 20,761 samples, while the testing sample size equals 4,345 samples.The preprocessing steps start with cleaning data by removing unnecessary special characters, numbers, English letters, and white spaces, and finally, removing stop words is implemented. After that, the most popular feature extraction method (TF-IDF) is used before applying the two suggested classification algorithms. The results show that the best accuracy achieved equals 89.11% using the decision tree model while using the random forest; the accuracy achieved equals 84.97 %.

Linguistic feature based learning model for fake news detection and classification

Social media is used as a dominant source of news distribution among users. The world's preeminent decisions such as politics are acclaimed by social media to influence users for enclosing users' decisions in their favor. However, the adoption of social media is much needed for awareness but the authenticity of content is an unknown factor in the current scenario. Therefore, this research work finds it imperative to propose a solution to fake news detection and classification. In the case of fake news, content is the prime entity that captures the human mind towards trust for specific news. Therefore, a linguistic model is proposed to find out the properties of content that will generate language-driven features. This linguistic model extracts syntactic, grammatical, sentimental, and readability features of particular news. Language driven model requires an approach to handle time-consuming and handcrafted features problems in order to deal with the curse of dimensionality problem. Therefore, the neural-based sequential learning model is used to achieve superior results for fake news detection. The results are drawn to validate the importance of the linguistic model extracted features and finally combined linguistic feature-driven model is able to achieve the average accuracy of 86% for fake news detection and classification. The sequential neural model results are compared with machine learning based models and LSTM based word embedding based fake news detection model as well. Comparative results show that features based sequential model is able to achieve comparable evaluation performance in discernable less time.

Research note: The scale of Facebook’s problem depends upon how ‘fake news’ is classified

Ushering in the contemporary ‘fake news’ crisis, Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News reported that it outperformed mainstream news on Facebook in the three months prior to the 2016 US presidential elections. Here the report’s methods and findings are revisited for 2020. Examining Facebook user engagement of election-related stories, and applying Silverman’s classification of fake news, it was found that the problem has worsened, implying that the measures undertaken to date have not remedied the issue. If, however, one were to classify ‘fake news’ in a stricter fashion, as Facebook as well as certain media organizations do with the notion of ‘false news’, the scale of the problem shrinks. A smaller scale problem could imply a greater role for fact-checkers (rather than deferring to mass-scale content moderation), while a larger one could lead to the further politicisation of source adjudication, where labelling particular sources broadly as ‘fake’, ‘problematic’ and/or ‘junk’ results in backlash.

Landslide detection by deep learning of non-nadiral and crowdsourced optical images

The recent development of mobile surveying platforms and crowdsourced geoinformation has produced a huge amount of non-validated data that are now available for research and application. In the field of risk analysis, with particular reference to landslide hazard, images generated by autonomous platforms (such as UAVs, ground-based acquisition systems, satellite sensors) and pictures obtained from web data mining are easily gathered and contribute to the fast surge in the amount of non-organized information that may engulf data storage facilities. Therefore, the high potential impact of such methods is severely reduced by the need of a massive amount of human intelligence tasks (HITs), which is necessary to filter and classify the data, whatever the final purpose. In this work, we present a new set of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) specifically designed for the automated recognition of landslides and mass movements in non-standard pictures that can be used in automated image classification, in supporting UAV autonomous guidance and in the filtering of data-mined information. Computer vision can be of great help in fostering the autonomous capability of intelligent systems to complement, or completely substitute, HITs. Image and object recognition are at the forefront of this research field. The deep learning procedure has been accomplished by applying transfer learning to some of the top-performer CNNs available in the literature. Results show that the deep learning machines, calibrated on a relevant dataset of validated images of landforms, may supply reliable predictions with computational time and resource requirements compatible with most of the UAV platforms and web data mining applications in landslide hazard studies. Average accuracy achieved by the proposed methods ranges between 87 and 90% and is consistently higher than that obtained by general-purpose state-of-the-art image recognition convolutional neural networks. The method can be applied to early warning, vulnerability assessment, residual risk estimation, model parameterisation and landslide mapping. Specific advantages will be the reduction of the present limitations in the intelligent guidance of landslide mapping drones, the classification of fake news, the validation of post-disaster information and the correct interpretation of an impending change in the environment.

A systematic mapping on automatic classification of fake news in social media

Social media has become the primary source for rumor spreading, and information quality is an increasingly important issue in this context. In the last years, many researchers have been working on methods to improve the rumor classification, especially on the identification of fake news in social media, with good results. However, due to the complexity of natural language, this task presents difficult challenges, and many research opportunities. This survey analyzes 87 distinct publications, which were systematically selected out of 1333 candidates. This work covers eight years of research on fake news applied in social media and presents the main methods, text and user features, and datasets used in literature.

Toward a Better Performance Evaluation Framework for Fake News Classification

The rising prevalence of fake news and its alarming downstream impact have motivated both the industry and academia to build a substantial number of fake news classification models, each with its unique architecture. Yet, the research community currently lacks a comprehensive model evaluation framework that can provide multifaceted comparisons between these models beyond the simple evaluation metrics such as accuracy or f1 scores. In our work, we examine a representative subset of classifiers using a very simple set of performance evaluation and error analysis steps. We demonstrate that model performance varies considerably based on i) dataset, ii) evaluation archetype, and iii) performance metrics. Additionally, classifiers also demonstrate a potential bias against small and conservative-leaning credible news sites. Finally, models' performance varies based on external events and article topics. In sum, our results highlight the need to move toward systematic benchmarking.

Improvement of Misleading and Fake News Classification for Flective Languages by Morphological Group Analysis

Due to the constantly evolving social media and different types of sources of information, we are facing different fake news and different types of misinformation. Currently, we are working on a project to identify applicable methods for identifying fake news for floating language types. We explored different approaches to detect fake news in the presented research, which are based on morphological analysis. This is one of the basic components of natural language processing. The aim of the article is to find out whether it is possible to improve the methods of dataset preparation based on morphological analysis. We collected our own and unique dataset, which consisted of articles from verified publishers and articles from news portals that are known as the publishers of fake and misleading news. Articles were in the Slovak language, which belongs to the floating types of languages. We explored different approaches in this article to the dataset preparation based on morphological analysis. The prepared datasets were the input data for creating the classifier of fake and real news. We selected decision trees for classification. The evaluation of the success of two different methods of preparation was carried out because of the success of the created classifier. We found a suitable dataset pre-processing technique by morphological group analysis. This technique could be used for improving fake news classification.

FNDNet – A deep convolutional neural network for fake news detection

With the increasing popularity of social media and web-based forums, the distribution of fake news has become a major threat to various sectors and agencies. This has abated trust in the media, leaving readers in a state of perplexity. There exists an enormous assemblage of research on the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies for fake news detection. In the past, much of the focus has been given on classifying online reviews and freely accessible online social networking-based posts. In this work, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (FNDNet) for fake news detection. Instead of relying on hand-crafted features, our model (FNDNet) is designed to automatically learn the discriminatory features for fake news classification through multiple hidden layers built in the deep neural network. We create a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract several features at each layer. We compare the performance of the proposed approach with several baseline models. Benchmarked datasets were used to train and test the model, and the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art results with an accuracy of 98.36% on the test data. Various performance evaluation parameters such as Wilcoxon, false positive, true negative, precision, recall, F1, and accuracy, etc. were used to validate the results. These results demonstrate significant improvements in the area of fake news detection as compared to existing state-of-the-art results and affirm the potential of our approach for classifying fake news on social media. This research will assist researchers in broadening the understanding of the applicability of CNN-based deep models for fake news detection.

Named Entities and Their Role in Creating Context Information.

Context encompasses the classification of a certain environment by its key attributes that take the role of semantic markers. It is an abstract representation of a certain data environment. In texts, the context classifies and represents a piece of text in a generalized form. Context can be a recursive construct when summarizing information on a more coarse-grained level. This paper presents identification and standardization of context on different levels of granularity that finally supports faster and more precise information retrieval. The prototypical system presented here applies supervised learning for a semi-automatic approach to extract, distil, and standardize data from text. The approach is based on named-entity recognition and simple ontologies for identification and disambiguation of context. Even though the prototype shown here still represents work in progress, it already demonstrates its potential for mining texts on different levels of context granularity. The paper presents the design of the Contexter system that supports identification and classification of misinformation and fake news around the topic Covid-19.

Fake News Identification and Classification Using DSSM and Improved Recurrent Neural Network Classifier

ABSTRACTThe widespread use of social media has enormous consequences for the society, culture and business with potentially positive and negative effects. As online social networks are increasingly used for dissemination of information, at the same they are also becoming a medium for the spread of fake news for various commercial and political purposes. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools offer great promise for researchers to build systems, which could automatically detect fake news. However, detecting fake news is a challenging task to accomplish as it requires models to summarize the news and compare it to the actual news in order to classify it as fake. This project proposes a framework that detects and classifies fake news messages using improved Recurrent Neural Networks and Deep Structured Semantic Model. The proposed approach intuitively identifies important features associated with fake news without previous domain knowledge while achieving accuracy 99%. The performance analysis method used for the proposed system is based on accuracy, specificity and sensitivity.

A Contemporary Survey of Machine Learning Techniques for Fake News Identification

Fake News is a grave problem in the society. The excessive reli-ance of people on internet for news is a huge motivation for spreading fake news on the internet and social media that creates a need for differentiat-ing it from the real. To fill this security void, various Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and other related in-formation and technology tools are currently being researched to segregate one from another. In this paper, we establish fake news as a problem, study the classification of fake news into different types, methods of classifying news as fake or real with excessively studying ‘Style Based’ methods. We will also study about the machine learning and natural language features and metrics that are used in classification and see how machine learning can be applied to check this problem. Finally, we will be applying some of these methods on Indian news and find out how they perform.

Classification of Fake News by Fine-tuning Deep Bidirectional Transformers based Language Model

With the ever-increasing rate of information dissemination and absorption, “Fake News” has become a real menace. People these days often fall prey to fake news that is in line with their perception. Checking the authenticity of news articles manually is a time-consuming and laborious task, thus, g