Applying Automatic Text Summarization for Fake News Detection

Philipp Hartl, Udo Kruschwitz


Abstract
The distribution of fake news is not a new but a rapidly growing problem. The shift to news consumption via social media has been one of the drivers for the spread of misleading and deliberately wrong information, as in addition to its ease of use there is rarely any veracity monitoring. Due to the harmful effects of such fake news on society, the detection of these has become increasingly important. We present an approach to the problem that combines the power of transformer-based language models while simultaneously addressing one of their inherent problems. Our framework, CMTR-BERT, combines multiple text representations, with the goal of circumventing sequential limits and related loss of information the underlying transformer architecture typically suffers from. Additionally, it enables the incorporation of contextual information. Extensive experiments on two very different, publicly available datasets demonstrates that our approach is able to set new state-of-the-art performance benchmarks. Apart from the benefit of using automatic text summarization techniques we also find that the incorporation of contextual information contributes to performance gains.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.289
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2702–2713
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.289
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philipp Hartl and Udo Kruschwitz. 2022. Applying Automatic Text Summarization for Fake News Detection. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2702–2713, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Applying Automatic Text Summarization for Fake News Detection (Hartl & Kruschwitz, LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.289.pdf
Code
 phhartl/lrec_2022