Shriya Alladi


2025

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Cognitext@DravidianLangTech2025: Fake News Classification in Malayalam Using mBERT and LSTM
Shriya Alladi | Bharathi B
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Fake news detection is a crucial task in combat- ing misinformation, particularly in underrepresented languages such as Malayalam. This paper focuses on detecting fake news in Dravidian languages using two tasks: Social Media Text Classification and News Classification. We employ a fine-tuned multilingual BERT (mBERT) model for classifying a given social media text into original or fake and an LSTM-based architecture for accurately detecting and classifying fake news articles in the Malayalam language into different categories.Extensive preprocessing techniques, such as tokenization and text cleaning, were used to ensure data quality. Our experiments achieved significant accuracy rates and F1- scores. The study’s contributions include applying advanced machine learning techniques to the Malayalam language, addressing the lack of research on low-resource languages, and highlighting the challenges of fake news detection in multilingual and code-mixed environments.