Punny_Punctuators@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Detection and Classification of Fake News in Malayalam Social Media Text
Nafisa Tabassum, Sumaiya Aodhora, Rowshon Akter, Jawad Hossain, Shawly Ahsan, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque
Abstract
The alarming rise of fake news on social media poses a significant threat to public discourse and decision-making. While automatic detection of fake news offers a promising solution, research in low-resource languages like Malayalam often falls behind due to limited data and tools. This paper presents the participation of team Punny_Punctuators in the Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages shared task at DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024, addressing this gap. The shared task focuses on two sub-tasks: 1. classifying social media texts as original or fake, and 2. categorizing fake news into 5 categories. We experimented with various machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and transformer-based models as well as processing techniques such as transliteration. Malayalam-BERT achieved the best performance on both sub-tasks, which obtained us 2nd place with a macro f1-score of 0.87 for the subtask-1 and 11th place with a macro f1-score of 0.17 for the subtask-2. Our results highlight the potential of transformer models for low-resource languages in fake news detection and pave the way for further research in this crucial area.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.dravidianlangtech-1.30
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian's, Malta
- Editors:
- Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Elizabeth Sherly, Rajeswari Nadarajan, Manikandan Ravikiran
- Venues:
- DravidianLangTech | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 180–186
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.dravidianlangtech-1.30
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nafisa Tabassum, Sumaiya Aodhora, Rowshon Akter, Jawad Hossain, Shawly Ahsan, and Mohammed Moshiul Hoque. 2024. Punny_Punctuators@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Detection and Classification of Fake News in Malayalam Social Media Text. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 180–186, St. Julian's, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Punny_Punctuators@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Detection and Classification of Fake News in Malayalam Social Media Text (Tabassum et al., DravidianLangTech-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.dravidianlangtech-1.30.pdf