One_by_zero@DravidianLangTech 2025: Fake News Detection in Malayalam Language Leveraging Transformer-based Approach

Dola Chakraborty, Shamima Afroz, Jawad Hossain, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque


Abstract
The rapid spread of misinformation in the digital era presents critical challenges for fake news detection, especially in low-resource languages (LRLs) like Malayalam, which lack extensive datasets and pre-trained models for widely spoken languages. This gap in resources makes it harder to build robust systems for combating misinformation despite the significant societal and political consequences it can have. To address these challenges, this work proposes a transformer-based approach for Task 1 of the Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages (DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025), which focuses on classifying Malayalam social media texts as either original or fake. The experiments involved a range of ML techniques (Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Decision Trees (DT)) and DL architectures (BiLSTM, BiLSTM-LSTM, and BiLSTM-CNN). This work also explored transformer-based models, including IndicBERT, MuRiL, XLM-RoBERTa, and Malayalam BERT. Among these, Malayalam BERT achieved the best performance, with the highest macro F1-score of 0.892, securing a rank of 3rd in the competition.
Anthology ID:
2025.dravidianlangtech-1.82
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Elizabeth Sherly, Saranya Rajiakodi, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Subalalitha Cn, Dhivya Chinnappa
Venues:
DravidianLangTech | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
465–471
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.82/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dola Chakraborty, Shamima Afroz, Jawad Hossain, and Mohammed Moshiul Hoque. 2025. One_by_zero@DravidianLangTech 2025: Fake News Detection in Malayalam Language Leveraging Transformer-based Approach. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 465–471, Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One_by_zero@DravidianLangTech 2025: Fake News Detection in Malayalam Language Leveraging Transformer-based Approach (Chakraborty et al., DravidianLangTech 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.82.pdf