Text Data Augmentation Techniques for Fake News Detection in the Romanian Language

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the use of a Romanian data source, different classifiers, and text data augmentation techniques to implement a fake news detection system. The paper focusses on text data augmentation techniques to improve the efficiency of fake news detection tasks. This study provides two approaches for fake news detection based on content and context features found in the Factual.ro data set. For this purpose, we implemented two data augmentation techniques, Back Translation (BT) and Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), to improve the performance of the models. The results indicate that the implementation of the BT and EDA techniques successfully improved the performance of the classifiers used in our study. The results of our content-based approach show that an Extra Trees Classifier model is the most effective, whether data augmentation is used or not, as it produced the highest accuracy, precision, F1 score, and Kappa. The Random Forest Classifier with BT yielded the best results of the context-based experiment overall, with the highest accuracy, recall, F1 score, and Kappa. Furthermore, we found that BT and EDA led to an increase in the AUC scores of all models in both content-based and context-based data sets.