Text-mining-based Fake News Detection Using Ensemble Methods

Abstract

Social media is a platform to express one s views and opinions freely and has made communication easier than it was before. This also opens up an opportunity for people to spread fake news intentionally. The ease of access to a variety of news sources on the web also brings the problem of people being exposed to fake news and possibly believing such news. This makes it important for us to detect and flag such content on social media. With the current rate of news generated on social media, it is difficult to differentiate between genuine news and hoaxes without knowing the source of the news. This paper discusses approaches to detection of fake news using only the features of the text of the news, without using any other related metadata. We observe that a combination of stylometric features and text-based word vector representations through ensemble methods can predict fake news with an accuracy of up to 95.49%. 2020, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.