byteSizedLLM@DravidianLangTech 2025: Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages Using Transliteration-Aware XLM-RoBERTa and Transformer Encoder-Decoder

AbstractThis study addresses the challenge of fake news detection in code-mixed and transliterated text, focusing on a multilingual setting with significant linguistic variability. A novel approach is proposed, leveraging a fine-tuned multilingual transformer model trained using Masked Language Modeling on a dataset that includes original, fully transliterated, and partially transliterated text. The fine-tuned embeddings are integrated into a custom transformer classifier designed to capture complex dependencies in multilingual sequences. The system achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining transliteration-aware fine-tuning with robust transformer architectures to handle code-mixed and resource-scarce text, providing a scalable solution for multilingual natural language processing tasks.