WordWizards@DravidianLangTech 2024:Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages using Cross-lingual Sentence Embeddings

AbstractThe proliferation of fake news in digital media has become a significant societal concern, impacting public opinion, trust, and decision-making. This project focuses on the development of machine learning models for the detection of fake news. Leveraging a dataset containing both genuine and deceptive news articles, the proposed models employ natural language processing techniques, feature extraction and classification algorithms. This paper provides a solution to Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages - DravidianLangTech 2024. There are two sub tasks: Task 1 - The goal of this task is to classify a given social media text into original or fake. We propose an approach for this with the help of a supervised machine learning model – SVM (Support Vector Machine). The SVM classifier achieved a macro F1 score of 0.78 in test data and a rank 11. The Task 2 is classifying fake news articles in Malayalam language into different categories namely False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False and Mostly True.We have used Naive Bayes which achieved macro F1-score 0.3517 in test data and a rank 6.