Ensemble Techniques for Robust Fake News Detection: Integrating Transformers, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning

The proliferation of fake news is one of the major problems that causes personal and societal harm. In today’s fast-paced digital age, misinformation spreads rapidly, often leaving individuals without the time to verify the authenticity of the information. This can cause irreparable damage to personal reputations and organizational credibility. Thus, instigated by the quintessential necessity, there is a dire need to construct a framework for the automatic detection and identification of fake news at its inception. This research presents a novel approach that leverages a combination of three popular word embeddings (FastText, FastText-Subword, and GloVe) integrated with a customized convolutional neural-network(CNN) to classify fake news accurately. The proposed model was tested against the Fake News Challenge dataset. Hundreds of word vector features were generated from the combined embedding and then managed with PCA and significant features were extracted. The proposed model gives an accuracy of 94.58%, 95.35% precision, 97.29% recall, and an F1 score of 96.11%. The proposed framework’s robustness is demonstrated when compared with other machine, deep, and ensemble learning approaches, showing superior performance. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the model is validated on an independent Arabic Fake News dataset.

Due to the widespread use of social media, people are exposed to fake news and misinformation. Spreading fake news has adverse effects on both the general public and governments. This issue motivated researchers to utilize advanced natural language processing concepts to detect such misinformation in social media. Despite the recent research studies that only focused on semantic features extracted by deep contextualized text representation models, we aim to show that content-based feature engineering can enhance the semantic models in a complex task like fake news detection. These features can provide valuable information from different aspects of input texts and assist our neural classifier in detecting fake and real news more accurately than using semantic features. To substantiate the effectiveness of feature engineering besides semantic features, we proposed a deep neural architecture in which three parallel convolutional neural network (CNN) layers extract semantic features from contextual representation vectors. Then, semantic and content-based features are fed to a fully connected layer. We evaluated our model on an English dataset about the COVID-19 pandemic and a domain-independent Persian fake news dataset (TAJ). Our experiments on the English COVID-19 dataset show 4.16% and 4.02% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the baseline model, which does not benefit from the content-based features. We also achieved 2.01% and 0.69% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art results reported by Shifath et al. (A transformer based approach for fighting covid-19 fake news, arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.12027, 2021). Our model outperformed the baseline on the TAJ dataset by improving accuracy and f1-score metrics by 1.89% and 1.74%, respectively. The model also shows 2.13% and 1.6% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art model proposed by Samadi et al. (ACM Trans Asian Low-Resour Lang Inf Process, https://doi.org/10.1145/3472620, 2021).

Nowadays, the dissemination of news information has become more rapid, liberal, and open to the public. People can find what they want to know more and more easily from a variety of sources, including traditional news outlets and new social media platforms. However, at a time when our lives are glutted with all kinds of news, we cannot help but doubt the veracity and legitimacy of these news sources; meanwhile, we also need to guard against the possible impact of various forms of fake news. To combat the spread of misinformation, more and more researchers have turned to natural language processing (NLP) approaches for effective fake news detection. However, in the face of increasingly serious fake news events, existing detection methods still need to be continuously improved. This study proposes a modified proof-of-concept model named NER-SA, which integrates natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER) to conduct the in-domain and cross-domain analysis of fake news detection with the existing three datasets simultaneously. The named entities associated with any particular news event exist in a finite and available evidence pool. Therefore, entities must be mentioned and recognized in this entity bank in any authentic news articles. A piece of fake news inevitably includes only some entitlements in the entity bank. The false information is deliberately fabricated with fictitious, imaginary, and even unreasonable sentences and content. As a result, there must be differences in statements, writing logic, and style between legitimate news and fake news, meaning that it is possible to successfully detect fake news. We developed a mathematical model and used the simulated annealing algorithm to find the optimal legitimate area. Comparing the detection performance of the NER-SA model with current state-of-the-art models proposed in other studies, we found that the NER-SA model indeed has superior performance in detecting fake news. For in-domain analysis, the accuracy increased by an average of 8.94% on the LIAR dataset and 19.36% on the fake or real news dataset, while the F1-score increased by an average of 24.04% on the LIAR dataset and 19.36% on the fake or real news dataset. In cross-domain analysis, the accuracy and F1-score for the NER-SA model increased by an average of 28.51% and 24.54%, respectively, across six domains in the FakeNews AMT dataset. The findings and implications of this study are further discussed with regard to their significance for improving accuracy, understanding context, and addressing adversarial attacks. The development of stylometric detection based on NLP approaches using NER techniques can improve the effectiveness and applicability of fake news detection.

The proliferation of fake news has increased substantially in the post-pandemic era. As a major threat to society as a whole, there have been considerable research efforts into identifying and limiting the dissemination of fake news, particularly using transformer based Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the efficiency of these models for detecting fake news on regional languages or dialects continues to be sub-par, particularly due to the lack of pre-training and fine-tuning datasets in resource-constrained languages like Hindi. Transformer models are also particularly data-intensive, and necessitate substantially large datasets for fine-tuning to perform well. There is a urgent requirement for efficient Hindi fake news detection mechanisms which can work in few-shot settings, with limited training data. In this work, a contrastive learning approach is proposed for detecting Hindi fake news. Contrary to existing contrastive learning approaches in literature, the proposed approach works exclusively on text data, and does not require supporting data from other modalities. Additionally, the proposed approach does not use data augmentation unlike other frameworks. Experiments indicate that the proposed approach can outperform transformer based models in few-shot settings, and thus, serves as an effective approach for fake news detection in Hindi and other resource-constrained languages.

In this manuscript, the rise of misinformation and harmful behavior on social media platforms has made it crucial to develop systems that ensure the authenticity of shared content and user accounts is presented. Parsing of social media feeds for forensic investigation aims to identify fake news and detect fake social media accounts (focusing on platforms like Instagram). The main goal of parsing of social media feeds for forensic investigation is to protect users from misleading information spread by fake accounts. To achieve this, various modules are integrated into the system, including Data Collection and Pre-Processing, Fake News Detection and Account Authenticity Verification. Web scraping tools such as BeautifulSoup are used to gather real-time data, while machine learning algorithms, including Random Forest and Large Language Model (LLM) are employed to classify fake news and detect suspicious account behaviors. The system also uses NLP models to identify fake news patterns and generate comprehensive reports summarizing the findings of each module. By combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques, parsing of social media feeds for forensic investigation provides an essential platform for users to protect themselves from misleading information on social networks.

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, article’s topic, article’s 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.

Filtering, vetting, and verifying digital information is an area of core interest in information science. Online fake news is a specific type of digital misinformation that poses serious threats to democratic institutions, misguides the public, and can lead to radicalization and violence. Hence, fake news detection is an important problem for information science research. While there have been multiple attempts to identify fake news, most of such efforts have focused on a single modality (e.g., only text‐based or only visual features). However, news articles are increasingly framed as multimodal news stories, and hence, in this work, we propose a multimodal approach combining text and visual analysis of online news stories to automatically detect fake news. Drawing on key theories of information processing and presentation, we identify multiple text and visual features that are associated with fake or credible news articles. We then perform a predictive analysis to detect features most strongly associated with fake news. Next, we combine these features in predictive models using multiple machine‐learning techniques. The experimental results indicate that a multimodal approach outperforms single‐modality approaches, allowing for better fake news detection.

Classifier algorithms are a subfield of data mining and play an integral role in finding patterns and relationships within large datasets. In recent years, fake news detection has become a popular area of data mining for several important reasons, including its negative impact on decision-making and its virality within social networks. In the past, traditional fake news detection has relied primarily on information context, while modern approaches rely on auxiliary information to classify content. Modelling with machine learning and natural language processing can aid in distinguishing between fake and real news. In this research, we mine data from Reddit, the popular online discussion forum and social news aggregator, and measure machine learning classifiers in order to evaluate each algorithm’s accuracy in detecting fake news using only a minimal subset of data.

The proliferation of fake news across online media platforms poses significant challenges to public trust,societal harmony,and information integrity.Many of the things that people read online, particularly on social media, seem true, but they are frequently not. Fake news is defined as news, articles, or hoaxes that are purposefully created to mislead or deceive readers..This study develops a machine learning-based system for detecting fake news on digital platforms. Utilizing algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Machines (SVM), the system processes textual data using natural language processing (NLP) techniques like term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and bag-of- words for feature extraction.The performance of each algorithm is evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score to identify the most effective model. By identifying the most effective machine learning model, this research aims to provide a scalable solution that can help reduce misinformation and enhance the credibility of online information.By distinguishing the best A1 model,this expectation expects to give a versatile arrangement that can assist with lessening deception and improve the believability of online data. Keywords- News and Fake,Natural Language Processing,Feature Extraction,a classification and Model Evaluation

The recent advancements made in World Wide Web and social networking have eased the spread of fake news among people at a faster rate. At most of the times, the intention of fake news is to misinform the people and make manipulated societal insights. The spread of low-quality news in social networking sites has a negative influence upon people as well as the society. In order to overcome the ever-increasing dissemination of fake news, automated detection models are developed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) methods. The latest advancements in Deep Learning (DL) models and complex Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks make the former, a significant solution to achieve Fake News Detection (FND). In this background, the current study focuses on design and development of Natural Language Processing with Sea Turtle Foraging Optimization-based Deep Learning Technique for Fake News Detection and Classification (STODL-FNDC) model. The aim of the proposed STODL-FNDC model is to discriminate fake news from legitimate news in an effectual manner. In the proposed STODL-FNDC model, the input data primarily undergoes pre-processing and Glove-based word embedding. Besides, STODL-FNDC model employs Deep Belief Network (DBN) approach for detection as well as classification of fake news. Finally, STO algorithm is utilized after adjusting the hyperparameters involved in DBN model, in an optimal manner. The novelty of the study lies in the design of STO algorithm with DBN model for FND. In order to improve the detection performance of STODL-FNDC technique, a series of simulations was carried out on benchmark datasets. The experimental outcomes established the better performance of STODL-FNDC approach over other methods with a maximum accuracy of 95.50%.

The online spread of fake news on various platforms has emerged as a significant concern, posing threats to public opinion, political stability, and the dissemination of reliable information. Researchers have turned to advanced technologies, including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, to detect and classify fake news to address this issue. This research study explores fake news classification using diverse ML and DL approaches. We utilized a well-known “Fake News” dataset sourced from Kaggle, encompassing a labelled news collection. We implemented diverse ML models, including multinomial naïve bayes (MNB), gaussian naïve bayes (GNB), Bernoulli naïve Bayes (BNB), logistic regression (LR), and passive aggressive classifier (PAC). Additionally, we explored DL models, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and CNN-LSTM. We compared the performance of these models based on key evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1 score. Additionally, we conducted cross-validation and hyperparameter tuning to ensure optimal performance. The results provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each model in classifying fake news. We observed that DL models, particularly LSTM and CNN-LSTM, showed better performance compared to traditional ML models. These models achieved higher accuracy and demonstrated robustness in classification tasks. These findings emphasize the potential of DL models to tackle the spread of fake news effectively and highlight the importance of utilizing advanced techniques to address this challenging problem.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that significantly affect the prediction of fake news from the virality theory perspective. The paper looks at a mix of emotion-driven content, sentimental resonance, topic modeling and linguistic features of news articles to predict the probability of fake news.Design/methodology/approachA data set of over 12,000 articles was chosen to develop a model for fake news detection. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques were used to handle big data with efficiency. Lexicon-based emotion analysis provided eight kinds of emotions used in the article text. The cluster of topics was extracted using topic modeling (five topics), while sentiment analysis provided the resonance between the title and the text. Linguistic features were added to the coding outcomes to develop a logistic regression predictive model for testing the significant variables. Other machine learning algorithms were also executed and compared.FindingsThe results revealed that positive emotions in a text lower the probability of news being fake. It was also found that sensational content like illegal activities and crime-related content were associated with fake news. The news title and the text exhibiting similar sentiments were found to be having lower chances of being fake. News titles with more words and content with fewer words were found to impact fake news detection significantly.Practical implicationsSeveral systems and social media platforms today are trying to implement fake news detection methods to filter the content. This research provides exciting parameters from a viral theory perspective that could help develop automated fake news detectors.Originality/valueWhile several studies have explored fake news detection, this study uses a new perspective on viral theory. It also introduces new parameters like sentimental resonance that could help predict fake news. This study deals with an extensive data set and uses advanced natural language processing to automate the coding techniques in developing the prediction model.

Recently, fake news has been widely spread through the Internet due to the increased use of social media for communication. Fake news has become a significant concern due to its harmful impact on individual attitudes and the community’s behavior. Researchers and social media service providers have commonly utilized artificial intelligence techniques in the recent few years to rein in fake news propagation. However, fake news detection is challenging due to the use of political language and the high linguistic similarities between real and fake news. In addition, most news sentences are short, therefore finding valuable representative features that machine learning classifiers can use to distinguish between fake and authentic news is difficult because both false and legitimate news have comparable language traits. Existing fake news solutions suffer from low detection performance due to improper representation and model design. This study aims at improving the detection accuracy by proposing a deep ensemble fake news detection model using the sequential deep learning technique. The proposed model was constructed in three phases. In the first phase, features were extracted from news contents, preprocessed using natural language processing techniques, enriched using n-gram, and represented using the term frequency–inverse term frequency technique. In the second phase, an ensemble model based on deep learning was constructed as follows. Multiple binary classifiers were trained using sequential deep learning networks to extract the representative hidden features that could accurately classify news types. In the third phase, a multi-class classifier was constructed based on multilayer perceptron (MLP) and trained using the features extracted from the aggregated outputs of the deep learning-based binary classifiers for final classification. The two popular and well-known datasets (LIAR and ISOT) were used with different classifiers to benchmark the proposed model. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, which use deep contextualized representation with convolutional neural network (CNN), the proposed model shows significant improvements (2.41%) in the overall performance in terms of the F1score for the LIAR dataset, which is more challenging than other datasets. Meanwhile, the proposed model achieves 100% accuracy with ISOT. The study demonstrates that traditional features extracted from news content with proper model design outperform the existing models that were constructed based on text embedding techniques.

In today’s interconnected digital landscape, the proliferation of fake news has become a significant challenge, with far-reaching implications for individuals, institutions, and societies. The rapid spread of misleading information undermines the credibility of genuine news outlets and threatens informed decision-making, public trust, and democratic processes. Recognizing the profound relevance and urgency of addressing this issue, this research embarked on a mission to harness the power of machine learning to combat fake news menace. This study develops an ensemble machine learning model for fake news classification. The research is targeted at spreading fake news. The research subjects are machine learning methods for misinformation classification. Methods: we employed three state-of-the-art algorithms: LightGBM, XGBoost, and Balanced Random Forest (BRF). Each model was meticulously trained on a comprehensive dataset curated to encompass a diverse range of news articles, ensuring a broad representation of linguistic patterns and styles. A distinctive feature of the proposed approach is the emphasis on token importance. By leveraging specific tokens that exhibited a high degree of influence on classification outcomes, we enhanced the precision and reliability of the developed models. The empirical results were both promising and illuminating. The LightGBM model emerged as the top performer among the three, registering an impressive F1-score of 97.74% and an accuracy rate of 97.64%. Notably, all three of the proposed models consistently outperformed several existing models previously documented in academic literature. This comparative analysis underscores the efficacy and superiority of the proposed ensemble approach. In conclusion, this study contributes a robust, innovative, and scalable solution to the pressing challenge of fake news detection. By harnessing the capabilities of advanced machine learning techniques, the research findings pave the way for enhancing the integrity and veracity of information in an increasingly digitalized world, thereby safeguarding public trust and promoting informed discourse.

The rise of social media has revolutionized information dissemination, creating new opportunities but also significant challenges. One such challenge is the proliferation of fake news, which undermines the credibility of journalism and contributes to societal unrest. Manually identifying fake news is impractical due to the vast volume of content, prompting the development of automated systems for fake news detection. This challenge has motivated numerous research efforts aimed at developing automated systems for fake news detection. However, most of these approaches rely on supervised learning, which requires significant time and effort to construct labeled datasets. While there have been a few attempts to develop unsupervised methods for fake news detection, their reported accuracy results thereof remain unsatisfactory. This research proposes an unsupervised approach using clustering algorithms, including Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), K-means, and K-medoids, to eliminate the need for manual labeling in detecting fake news. In particular, it also proposes a novel hybrid method that leverages the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) in conjunction with the Group Counseling Optimizer (GCO), a metaheuristic optimization algorithm, to identify the optimal number of clusters for the detection of fake news. The comparative analysis of the evaluation results on real-world data demonstrated that the proposed hybrid GMM outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, with a silhouette score of 0.77, ARI of 0.83, and a purity score of 0.88, indicating a significantly improved quality of clustering results.