@inproceedings{santos-etal-2026-exploring,
    title = "Exploring Knowledge Graphs for Automatic Fake News Detection in {P}ortuguese",
    author = "Santos, Lucas dos  and
      Santos, Manoel Rodrigues Euclides  and
      Souza, Yuri Silva  and
      Sousa, Jo{\~a}o Pedro Holanda  and
      Santos, Roney Lira de Sales",
    editor = "Souza, Marlo  and
      de-Dios-Flores, Iria  and
      Santos, Diana  and
      Freitas, Larissa  and
      Souza, Jackson Wilke da Cruz  and
      Ribeiro, Eug{\'e}nio",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of {P}ortuguese ({PROPOR} 2026) - Vol. 1",
    month = apr,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Salvador, Brazil",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2026.propor-1.44/",
    pages = "446--455",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-387-6",
    abstract = "The proliferation of fake news in digital environments poses serious challenges to democratic processes, particularly in morphologically rich languages such as Portuguese. While most existing approaches focus on stylistic cues or propagation patterns in social networks, this paper proposes an automated fake news verification methodology grounded in Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Instead of treating news as raw text, we represent each article as a set of factual events encoded as semantic triples of subject, predicate, and object. A proprietary knowledge graph is built from Brazilian data sources, and a verification algorithm is introduced to estimate the veracity of news articles based on graph connectivity evidence. Experimental results confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight its inherent explainability as a key advantage over deep learning black-box models. Error analysis further indicates that the main limitation stems from the syntactic complexity of Open Information Extraction in Portuguese, suggesting that improvements at this extraction stage are essential to increase system robustness."
}