Question: What is fake news?
Evidence: For this report, we are exploring the field of natural language processing, which is the broad study of how computers and machines can understand human to human communication and how texts are analyzed based on contextual information by machines.
In particular, we are using natural language processing to classify news articles as real news or “fake news”. Fake news is misinformation masked under the guise of a real news article, and is used to deceptively influence people’s beliefs.
For this report, we are classifying news articles as “real” or “fake”, which will be a binary classification problem - classifying the samples as a positive (with fake news) or negative (not fake news) sample. Many studies have used machine learning algorithms and build classifiers based on features like content, the author’s name and job-title, using lots of models like the convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN), feed-forward neural network (FFNN), long-short term memory (LSTM) and logistic regression to find the most optimal model and return its results. In [1], the author built a classifier using natural language processing and used models like CNN, RNN, FFNN, and Logistic Regression and concluded that the CNN classifiers could not be as competitive as the RNN classifiers. The authors in [2] think that their study can be improved by having more features like knowing the history of lies spoken by the news reporter or the speaker.
Moreover, apart from the traditional machine learning methods, new models have also been developed. One of the newer models, TraceMiner, creates an LSTM-RNN model inferring from the embedding of social media users in the social network structure to propagate through the path of messages and has provided high classification accuracy$^{5}$. FAKEDETECTOR is another inference model developed to detect the credibility of the fake news which is considered to be quite reliable and accurate$^{7}$.
There also have been studies that have a different approach. A paper surveys the current state-of-the-art technologies that are imperative when adopting and developing fake news detection and provides a classification of several accurate assessment methods that analyze the text and detect anomalies$^{3}$.
These previous approaches lack a clear contextual analysis used in NLP. We considered the semantic meaning of each word and we feel that the presence of particular words influence the meaning. We reckoned this important since we felt the contextual meaning of the text needs to be preserved and analyzed for better classification. Other studies emphasize the user and features related to them. In [4], “45 features…[were used] for predicting accuracy...across four types: structural, user, content, and temporal,” so features included characteristics beyond the text. Article [6] "learn[s] the representations of news articles, creators and subjects simultaneously." In our project, we emphasize the content by working with articles whose labels only relate to the text, nothing outside that scope, and have used SVM, Logistic Regression, ANN, LSTM, and Random Forest.
We had devised this problem into 3 different phases: pre-processing, text-to-numeric representation conversion using pre-trained algorithms, and then evaluate the models using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. We had analysed the data set and in particular the text part of the data explaining how it is distributed and then we converted each text into numeric representation using pre-training models such as TFIDF, CV and W2V for vector representation. Finally, we evaluated our numeric conversion data using significant machine learning algorithms such as neural networks, classification algorithms etc to perform the classification.
Fake news is misinformation masked under the guise of a real news article, and is used to deceptively influence people’s beliefs.
Answer: Fake news is misinformation masked under the guise of a real news article, and is used to deceptively influence people’s beliefs.