Abstract:
The spread of misinformation has become a severe issue affecting society. Inaccurate information has
enormous potential to cause real-world impacts. Developing algorithms to detect fake news automatically
will be very useful in preventing unnecessary panic and damage caused by rumors. This fake news
problem is present for all languages, and it becomes crucial to solve it for languages other than English,
with scarce datasets. This paper aims to tackle the problem of automatic fake news detection in Urdu,
a low-resource language. FIRE-2021 has provided the Urdu dataset used in this paper. We fine-tuned
monolingual and multilingual transformers. After searching for hyperparameters, we tried ensembling
our models. We submitted our model for the UrduFake task, and it achieved an accuracy of 0.596 and an F1-
macro score of 0.449.