Arabic Fake News Detection: A Fact Checking Based Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Fake news stories can polarize society, particularly during political events. They undermine confidence in the media in general. Current NLP systems are still lacking the ability to properly interpret and classify Arabic fake news. Given the high stakes involved, determining truth in social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. Our literature review indicates that applying the state-of-the-art approaches on news content address some challenges in detecting fake news’ characteristics, which needs auxiliary information to make a clear determination. Moreover, the ‘Social-context-based’ and ‘propagation-based’ approaches can be either an alternative or complementary strategy to content-based approaches. The main goal of our research is to develop a model capable of automatically detecting truth given an Arabic news or claim. In particular, we propose a deep neural network approach that can classify fake and real news claims by exploiting ‘Convolutional Neuron Networks’. Our approach attempts to solve the problem from the fact checking perspective, where the fact-checking task involves predicting whether a given news text claim is factually authentic or fake. We opt to use an Arabic balanced corpus to build our model because it unifies stance detection, stance rationale, relevant document retrieval and fact-checking. The model is trained on different well selected attributes. An extensive evaluation has been conducted to demonstrate the ability of the fact-checking task in detecting the Arabic fake news. Our model outperforms the performance of the state-of-the-art approaches when applied to the same Arabic dataset with the highest accuracy of 91%.