The digital information age has generated new outlets for content creators to publish so-called “fake news”.
Popularized as a concept in the United States during the 2016 presidential election, fake news is a form of propaganda created to mislead readers, in order to generate views on websites or steer public opinion.
With the widespread effects of the fast dissemination of fake news, efforts have been made to automate the process of fake news detection.
A promising solution that has come up recently is to use machine learning to detect patterns in the news sources and articles,specifically deep neural networks, which have been successful in natural language processing. However, deep networks come with lack of transparency in the decision-making process, i.e. the “black-box problem”, which obscures its reliability.
Almost as quickly as the fake news issue became mainstream, researchers began developing automated fake news detectors — so-called neural networks that “learn” from scores of data to recognize linguistic cues indicative of false articles. Given new articles to assess, these networks can, with fairly high accuracy, separate fact from fiction, in controlled settings.
One issue, however, is the “black box” problem — meaning there’s no telling what linguistic patterns the networks analyze during training. They’re also trained and tested on the same topics, which may limit their potential to generalize to new topics, a necessity for analyzing news across the internet.
New work from MIT researchers peers under the hood of an automated fake-news detection system, revealing how machine-learning models catch subtle but consistent differences in the language of factual and false stories. The research also underscores how fake-news detectors should undergo more rigorous testing to be effective for real-world applications.
The Researchers developed a deep-learning model that learns to detect language patterns of fake and real news. Part of their work “cracks open” the black box to find the words and phrases the model captures to make its predictions.
Additionally, they tested their model on a novel topic it didn’t see in training. This approach classifies individual articles based solely on language patterns, which more closely represents a real-world application for news readers. Traditional fake news detectors classify articles based on text combined with source information, such as a Wikipedia page or website.
News Source: MIT News
