Detection of Human and Machine-Authored Fake News in Urdu

Muhammad Zain Ali, Yuxia Wang, Bernhard Pfahringer, Tony C Smith


Abstract
The rise of social media has amplified the spread of fake news, now further complicated by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which ease the generation of highly convincing, error-free misinformation, making it increasingly challenging for the public to discern truth from falsehood. Traditional fake news detection methods relying on linguistic cues have also become less effective. Moreover, current detectors primarily focus on binary classification and English texts, often overlooking the distinction between machine-generated true vs. fake news and the detection in low-resource languages. To this end, we updated the detection schema to include machine-generated news focusing on Urdu. We further propose a conjoint detection strategy to improve the accuracy and robustness. Experiments show its effectiveness across four datasets in various settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.170
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3419–3428
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.170/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Zain Ali, Yuxia Wang, Bernhard Pfahringer, and Tony C Smith. 2025. Detection of Human and Machine-Authored Fake News in Urdu. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3419–3428, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detection of Human and Machine-Authored Fake News in Urdu (Ali et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.170.pdf