Assessing the combination of DistilBERT news representations and difusion topological features to classify fake news

Abstract

Fake news (FN) have affected people’s lives in unimaginable ways. The automatic classification of FN is a vital tool to prevent their dissemination and support fact-checking. Related work has shown that FN spread faster, deeper, and more broadly than truthful news on social media. Deep learning has produced state-of-the-art solutions in this field, mainly based on textual attributes. In this paper, we propose to combine compact representations of the textual news properties generated using DistilBERT, with topological metrics extracted from their propagation network in social media. Using a dataset related to politics and distinct learning algorithms, we extensively assessed the components of the proposed solution. Regarding the textual attributes, we reached results comparable to stateof-the-art solutions using only the news title and contents, which is useful for FN early detection. We assessed the influential topological metrics, and the effect of their combination with the news textual features. We also explored the use of ensembles. Our results were very promising, revealing the potential of the features proposed and the adoption of ensembles.