This paper reports an experiment carried out to investigate the relevance of several syntactic, stylistic and pragmatic features on the task of distinguishing between mainstream and partisan news articles. The results of the evaluation of different feature sets and the extent to which various feature categories could affect the performance metrics are discussed and compared. Among different combinations of features and classifiers, Random Forest classifier using vector representations of the headline and the text of the report, with the inclusion of 8 readability scores and few stylistic features yielded best result, ranking our team at the 9th place at the SemEval 2019 Hyperpartisan News Detection challenge.

The viral spread of false, unverified and misleading information on the Internet has attracted a heightened attention of an interdisciplinary research community on the phenomenon. This paper contributes to the research efforts of automatically determining the veracity of rumourous tweets and classifying their replies according to stance. Our research objective was to investigate the interplay between a number of phenomenological and contextual features of rumours, in particular, we explore the extent to which network structural characteristics, metadata and user profiles could complement the linguistic analysis of the written content for the task at hand. The current findings strongly demonstrate that supplementary sources of information play significant role in classifying the veracity and the stance of Twitter interactions deemed to be rumourous.