BanFakeNews: A Dataset for Detecting Fake News in Bangla (LREC 2020)

Recent Update

A new notebook (BanFake.ipynb) has been added to the repository to make it easier to use Huggingface’s Transformer package and experiment with new language models.

Abstract

Observing the damages that can be done by the rapid propagation of fake news in various sectors like politics and finance, automatic identification of fake news using linguistic analysis has drawn the attention of the research community. However, such methods are largely being developed for English where low resource languages remain out of the focus. But the risks spawned by fake and manipulative news are not confined by languages. In this work, we propose an annotated dataset of ~50K news that can be used for building automated fake news detection systems for a low resource language like Bangla. Additionally, we provide an analysis of the dataset and develop a benchmark system with state of the art NLP techniques to identify Bangla fake news. To create this system, we explore traditional linguistic features and neural network based methods. We expect this dataset will be a valuable resource for building technologies to prevent the spreading of fake news and contribute in research with low resource languages.

Authors

• Md Zobaer Hossain¹
• Md Ashraful Rahman¹
• Md Saiful Islam¹
• Sudipta Kar²

¹ Shahjalal University of Science and Technology

² University of Houston

BanFakeNews dataset is available here.

List of files

• Authentic-48K.csv
• Fake-1K.csv
• LabeledAuthentic-7K.csv
• LabeledFake-1K.csv

File Format Authentic-48K.csv and Fake-1K.csv

LabeledAuthentic-7K.csv, LabeledFake-1K.csv

F-type is only present in LabeledFake-1K.csv

INSTALLATION

Requires the following packages:

• Python 3.7

It is recommended to use virtual environment packages such as virtualenv or conda Follow the steps below to setup project:

• Clone this repository. git clone https://github.com/Rowan1224/FakeNews.git
• Use this command to install required packages pip install -r requirements.txt
• Run the setup.sh file to download additional data and setup pre-processing

Usage

1. Download Fake News data from here.
2. Unzip the folder
3. Ensure the folder name is "Fake News Dataset"

Basic Experiments

• Go to Models/Basic folder
• Use python n-gram.py [Experiment Name] [Model] -s to run an experiment. For example: python n-gram.py Emb_F SVM -s will run the Emb_F experiment using SVM Model. Use -s to Save the results.
• Experiment Names (Please follow the paper to read the details about experiments) :
  • Unigram
  • Bigram
  • Trigram
  • U+B+T
  • C3-gram
  • C4-gram
  • C5-gram
  • C3+C4+C5
  • Lexical
  • POS
  • L_POS
  • Emb_F
  • Emb_N
  • L+POS+E_F
  • L+POS+E_N
  • MP
  • L+POS+E_F+MP
  • L+POS+E_N+MP
  • all_features
• Models:
  • SVM (Support Vector Machine)
  • LR (Logistic Regression)
  • RF (Random Forest)

NN Experiments

• Go to Models/NN folder
• Use python main.py [Model] -g to run an experiment. For example: python main.py CNN -g will run the experiment using CNN model. Use -g to run in GPU.
• Models:
  • CNN
  • LSTM

BERT

• Go to Models/BERT folder
• Use python bert.py [epoch] to run an experiment. For example: python bert.py 3 will run an experiment with 3 epochs

Bibtex

@InProceedings{Hossain20.1084,
 author = {Md Zobaer Hossain, Md Ashraful Rahman, Md Saiful Islam, Sudipta Kar},
 title = "{BanFakeNews: A Dataset for Detecting Fake News in Bangla}",
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020)},
 year = {2020},
 publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
language = {english}
}