FakeBERT: Fake news detection in social media with a BERT-based deep learning approach

Abstract

In the modern era of computing, the news ecosystem has transformed from old traditional print media to social media outlets. Social media platforms allow us to consume news much faster, with less restricted editing results in the spread of fake news at an incredible pace and scale. In recent researches, many useful methods for fake news detection employ sequential neural networks to encode news content and social context-level information where the text sequence was analyzed in a unidirectional way. Therefore, a bidirectional training approach is a priority for modelling the relevant information of fake news that is capable of improving the classification performance with the ability to capture semantic and long-distance dependencies in sentences. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) deep learning approach (FakeBERT) by combining different parallel blocks of the single-layer deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) having different kernel sizes and filters with the BERT. Such a combination is useful to handle ambiguity, which is the greatest challenge to natural language understanding. Classification results demonstrate that our proposed model (FakeBERT) outperforms the existing models with an accuracy of 98.90%.