NLP_goats@DravidianLangTech 2025: Detecting Fake News in Dravidian Languages: A Text Classification Approach

AbstractThe advent and expansion of social media have transformed global communication. Despite its numerous advantages, it has also created an avenue for the rapid spread of fake news, which can impact people’s decision-making and judgment. This study explores detecting fake news as part of the DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025 shared task, focusing on two key tasks. The aim of Task 1 is to classify Malayalam social media posts as either original or fake, and Task 2 categorizes Malayalam-language news articles into five levels of truthfulness: False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False, and Mostly True. We accomplished the tasks using transformer models, e.g., M-BERT and classifiers like Naive Bayes. Our results were promising, with M-BERT achieving the better results. We achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.83 for distinguishing between fake and original content in Task 1 and a score of 0.54 for classifying news articles in Task 2, ranking us 11 and 4, respectively.