CUET-NLP_Big_O@DravidianLangTech 2025: A BERT-based Approach to Detect Fake News from Malayalam Social Media Texts

AbstractThe rapid growth of digital platforms and social media has significantly contributed to spreading fake news, posing serious societal challenges. While extensive research has been conducted on detecting fake news in high-resource languages (HRLs) such as English, relatively little attention has been given to low-resource languages (LRLs) like Malayalam due to insufficient data and computational tools. To address this challenge, the DravidianLangTech 2025 workshop organized a shared task on fake news detection in Dravidian languages. The task was divided into two sub-tasks, and our team participated in Task 1, which focused on classifying social media texts as original or fake. We explored a range of machine learning (ML) techniques, including Logistic Regression (LR), Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM), as well as deep learning (DL) models such as CNN, BiLSTM, and a hybrid CNN+BiLSTM. Additionally, this work examined several transformer-based models, including m-BERT, Indic-BERT, XLM-Roberta, and MuRIL-BERT, to exploit the task. Our team achieved 6th place in Task 1, with MuRIL-BERT delivering the best performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.874.