FAKE NEWS DETECTION SYSTEM USING

LSTM AND TENSORFLOW

Muthu R Tamil Selvan M Vidhya P
Department of Artificial Intelligence Department of Artificial Intelligence Department of Artificial Intelligence
and Data Science and Data Science and Data Science
M.Kumarasamy College of M.Kumarasamy College of M.Kumarasamy College of
Engineering, Thalavapalayam Engineering, Thalavapalayam Engineering, Thalavapalayam
Karur, Tamilnadu,India – 639 113. Karur, Tamilnadu,India – 639 113. Karur, Tamilnadu,India – 639 113.
muthur2020ai@gmail.com tamilselvanm2020ai@gmail.com vidhyap.aiml@mkce.ac.in

Abstract — As digital technology has grown more
widely used, fake news has become a bigger source of
information pollution. Malicious content distribution that is
hurtful, offensive, or illegal can cause misunderstandings,
confusion, and social unrest, which can undermine social
stability and long-term economic growth. Researchers have
successfully identified fake news by using intelligent and
autonomous news data mining and analysis based on
information characteristics thanks to the ongoing advancements
in artificial intelligence technology. Nevertheless, research on
the interpretability of related approaches and the use of
multidisciplinary knowledge are absent from the current study.
This work focuses on the technology currently in use for
detecting fake news. The survey contains general technical
models, multimodal relevant technological information, false
news datasets, and research techniques for detecting fake news.
Keywords—Fake News Detection, LSTM, TensorFlow,
Neural Network .
I. Introduction
The advent of the Internet and the extensive use of social media
platforms—best represented by industry titans like Facebook and
Twitter—have transformed the distribution of knowledge in ways
never seen before in human history. Beyond the range of
applications, news reporting has seen one noteworthy influence.
Newspapers, tabloids, and magazines have given way to digital
formats including blogs, social media feeds, and online news
platforms as traditional media channels [1]. Customers can now
easily obtain real-time updates thanks to the move to digital media,
as seen by the substantial increase in traffic to news websites from
social media sites like Facebook [2]. These social media platforms
are a great forum for conversations about democracy, health, and
education, but they also have a double-edged effect that may be used
for evil intent, such spreading false information.
Over the past ten years, there has been a considerable increase
in false news, most notably during the US elections in 2016 [5]. This
increase in the internet spread of false information affects a variety
of fields, including sports, science, and health, in addition to politics
[3]. The influence of fake news has been particularly noticeable in
the financial markets, where a simple rumor can have disastrous
effects and even put markets to a complete halt [6]. People's
worldviews are shaped by the information they receive, which has a
significant impact on how they make decisions. It can erode trust in
media, institutions, and the democratic process. Additionally, false
information may lead to misguided decisions, public panic, or harm
to individuals and communities. Combatting fake news requires
critical media literacy and fact-checking efforts. Governments,
media organizations, an individual play crucial roles in addressing
this issue through education, promoting media literacy, and
fostering a culture of critical thinking.
the fake news issue be addressed in the light of the concerning
increase in cases when customers respond impulsively to
subsequently refuted news [7, 8]. A dramatic example of this is the
dissemination of erroneous information about the novel coronavirus,
with numerous misleading stories circulating online concerning the
nature, origin, and behaviour of the virus [9]. As more people were
exposed to and believed in these false materials, the misinformation
made matters worse. It is extremely difficult to recognize such false
information in the vastness of the internet.
The primary goal, a standard text classification problem with a
simple hypothesis, is to identify false information. Developing a
model that can distinguish between "real" and "fake" news is
necessary. This has an impact on social networking sites like
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Hike as well as instant messaging
apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, where the spread of false
information both domestically and internationally is greatly aided
by it.[2] The suggested method aids in determining the news's
veracity. The user is recommended the appropriate news article if
the news is false. The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2
is the Literature Survey. Section 3 provides the requirement and
analysis of model utilized for detecting fake news. Section 4
summarizes the fake news detection dataset. Section 5 evaluates the
explainable fake news detection techniques. Finally, Section 6
concludes the work and suggests directions for future research.
II. Literature Survey
To detect fake news, a number of projects have been
implemented, including:
The study paper on fake news identification, written by three
students from the Institute of Technology, Vivekananda Education
Society, Mumbai, was published in 2018. In their research paper,
they stated that the 20th century saw the beginning of the social
media era. Web traffic eventually rises together with the quantity of
posts and articles published. To identify bogus news, they employed
a variety of methods and instruments, including artificial
intelligence, machine learning, and NLP techniques.[5][6][7]
According to a report, Facebook and WhatsApp are also
focusing on detecting fake news. They have been working on it for
almost a year, and the alpha phase is happening right now.[2] Ho
Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT) student Nguyen
Vo conducted research on the identification of fake news and put it
into practice in 2017. In his study, he employed the Bi-directional
GRU with Attention mechanism for fake news identification; Yang
et al. were the ones who first presented it. Along with using various
deep learning algorithms, he attempted to apply more deep learning
models, including CNN, GAN, and auto-encoders. Stanford
University's Samir Bajaj released a study on the identification of
fake news. He uses an NLP approach to identify fake news and
applies another deep learning algorithm. He used real data from the
Signal Media News dataset. Highlighting key features that
contributed to the decision, and providing historical trends or
patterns that can help contextualize the decision. Furthermore,
integrating visualization techniques can enhance the explainability
of AI fraud detection systems [2]
III. Requirement and Analysis
In the first stage of the research, the main obstacles and
challenges related to developing a deep learning-based system for
detecting false news are identified and comprehended. One of the
main obstacles is developing a real-time detection system that can
filter through a lot of news content. The challenge is increased by
managing the intricacies of natural language processing (NLP) and
using computational intelligence (ML) methods. Outlining the
system's functional and non-functional requirements is essential
when creating criteria. The system must be able to manage large
amounts of data, recognize important characteristics, and categorize
news reports as true or fake. Conversely, non-functional criteria
cover things like general performance, scalability, and stability of
the system.
Before going on to the planning and execution stage, a
thorough project plan needs to be created. The plan ought to
precisely delineate crucial checkpoints, outputs, and corresponding
schedules, offering a methodical foundation for the project's
prosperous implementation. The project looks at identifying the
people, hardware, and software that are required during the resource
identification phase. In order to construct the false news detection
system, it is necessary to identify the precise hardware, software,
and equipment needed. This step addresses hardware requirements,
such as GPU processing capability, and is critical in selecting a deep
learning framework, such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
The project describes the specific requirements for the
hardware and technology needed to build the false news detection
system, as part of the computer programming and hardware
requirements phase. This entails deciding on the best deep learning
framework and specifying the necessary hardware, such as GPU
processing power. The false news detection system's overall layout
and composition are shaped during the early stages of the product
description process. Setting the input and output formats for the
system is another aspect of this step. In the conceptual model phase,
the false news detection system is represented at a high level.
Identifying important components, relationships, and functions
inside the system is part of this. Furthermore, a collection of apps is
developed to demonstrate the software's practical application.
IV. Implementation and Testing
A. Datasets
For this project we have used two different Datasets as ‘ISOT
Fake News dataset’, ‘LIAR’. Implementation and Testing There
are two categories of articles in the ISOT Fake News dataset:
fake news and factual news. This dataset was gathered from
real-world sources; Reuters.com (the news website) was
crawled for authentic articles. Regarding the bogus news
pieces, they were compiled from several sources. The false
news stories were gathered from dubious websites that
Figure 1(a). Word cloud for real news dataset.
Figure 1(b). Word cloud for fake news dataset.
Wikipedia and Politifact.com, an American fact-checking
group, had identified as suspicious. Although there are a
variety of article categories in the dataset covering a wide
range of topics, most articles centre around political and
global news stories.
There are two CSV files in the dataset. More than 12,600
items from reuter.com are contained in the first file,
"True.csv." The second file, "Fake.csv," has around 12,600
items from various sources of bogus news outlets. The
following details are included in every article: the kind, date
of publication, article title, and text. The majority of the
stories we collected were from 2016 to 2017, in order to
match the false news data gathered for kaggle.com. The
acquired data was cleaned and processed, but the text retained
the punctuation and errors from the fake news. We created
word maps for both actual and false news stories to obtain
insight into the dataset. Figure 1(a) depicts the actual news
item word cloud, whereas Figure 1(b) depicts the fake news
article word cloud.
The word clouds for the actual news items contain numerous
instances of terms like 'Said,' 'One,' 'People,' 'White House,'
'Country,' and 'America,' whereas the word clouds for the false news
pieces have a frequent appearance for phrases like 'Donald Trump,'
'United State,' 'Said,' 'Will,' and 'People'. The word 'say' appears
often in actual news stories but not in false news articles, whereas
the words 'North Korea' and 'US' appear frequently in bogus news
pieces but not in genuine news articles. These word clouds give
useful information for distinguishing between articles.
B. Data Preprocessing
To perform machine learning or machine learning with
supervision computations on corpora, specific preprocessing is
required. Textual data is frequently converted into a format that is
ready for display using a variety of methods. The processing
techniques listed below are used for both the titles and the articles.
We also go over the different word representations we used in our
investigation [10–12]. Eliminating raw text input before feeding it
into a deep neural network or artificial learning model is a crucial
stage in the processing of natural language. Data preparation in NLP
is the process of converting unformatted text input into a numerical
representation that models may use to make predictions or
classifications.
B.1. Stop Word Removal
A typical preprocessing step in text mining and natural
language processing (NLP) is stop word removal. Words known as
"stop words" are frequently used terms in a language, but they are
usually seen as having little meaning on their own, making them
useless for text analysis. In the English language, stop words include
"the," "and," "is," "in," and "it."
 The goal of stop word removal is to eliminate these frequently
Figure 2(a). True News Subject Distribution
used terms from a corpus of text so that the more important words
that best capture the spirit of the text can be highlighted. Eliminating
stop words can make the analysis more effective, and the words that
remain are frequently more pertinent to the text's underlying
semantics. Approaching the door, once the analysis is done, the door
is either unlocked or stays closed. [10]
B.2. Stemming
"Stemming" a name involves removing postfixes and
suffixes until the stem is all that's left. "Stemming" aids in the
reduction of adverbs and occasionally nouns with derivational links
to their most basic form. A type of text preprocessing technique
called stemming is used in natural language analysis (NLP) to
reduce phrases to their stem, or most fundamental form. Stem's main
objective is to standardize text data by combining different word
forms into one common form. One might simplify the terms
"running," "runs," and "ran" to simply "run." Stemming is a
necessary component of several NLP programs, including data
extraction, sentiment recognition, and topic modeling. It can help
reduce the level of dimensionality of text data by grouping. All
things considered, stemming is a useful text preprocessing technique
in natural language processing (NLP) that can help standardize text
input and boost the efficiency and precision of subsequent analysis
[12].
Figure 2(b). Fake News Subject Distribution
B.3. Vectorization
An essential step in the preparation of data for language
processing (NLP) is vectorization. It describes the process of
converting textual input into a numerical representation that
machine learning models can comprehend. A document may be
represented as an array of words or phrases in natural language
processing (NLP), and vector processing is the process of turning
these words into a variety of quantitative attributes. In NLP, one of
the most popular vectorization techniques is the bag-of-words
model. This paradigm treats a text as a collection of its most
common terms, tracking the quantity of each word but ignoring
word and grammar order. A sparse matrix is produced via the bag-
of-words paradigm, where columns represent each unique word in
the text and rows represent each document [8].
B.4. Padding
Text categorization, sentiment analysis, machine
translation, and other NLP tasks requiring repetitious information
benefit greatly from padding in the data preparation process. To
make all of the sequences equal in length, it involves adding zeros
or a predetermined value to the input code. To help the model adjust
to input sequences of different lengths, padding is applied [11].
When NLP tasks involve input sequences that can differ in length,
padding becomes necessary. One sentiment analysis work, for
example, might have reviews with multiple paragraphs and others
with just a few phrases. As every input sequence must be the same
length for the deep learning model to function, this could be an issue
during training. The model is unable to process sequences of
different lengths as inputs. In order to construct sequences that the
model can manage that are all the same length, padding is utilized
[12].
B.5. Embedding of Words
This is a crucial stage because artificial intelligence
algorithms need to be able to comprehend the data that has been
collected. We use various word embedding strategies to satisfy the
requirements of various models. We develop a tokenizer that
tokenizes the words and creates sequences of these encoded words
in order to start preparing the data for LSTM. After that, we zero-
pad each phrase to ensure its length is 42 characters. Next, using
random weights, the Embedding layer is used to learn a placeholder
for each phrase in the training data set. The Embedding layer, which
is essentially a collection of dense, actual values vectors, converts
the sequence into a distributed version [10-12].
B.6. LSTM
A kind of recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture called
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) was created to get over the
drawbacks of conventional RNNs in terms of identifying and
understanding long-range dependencies in sequential input. In 1997,
Jürgen Schmidhuber and Sepp Hochreiter introduced LSTMs. The
vanishing gradient problem, which arises while training deep neural
networks on sequences, is the primary difficulty that LSTMs attempt
to solve. The gradients of the loss function can get incredibly small
as information moves over multiple time steps, making it difficult
for the model to learn from previous segments of the sequence. To
solve this issue, LSTMs employ a memory cell together with a series
of gates.
V. Result
When assessing the model we developed to address the false
news detection issues, True Positive (TP), True-negative (TN), a
false negative (FN), and a false positive (FP) were the metrics that
were most frequently used. These metrics allow us to evaluate the
performance of a classifier from multiple perspectives.
The following Table contains the Precision, Recall, F1-Score and
Support of the LSTM algorithm on ISOT Fake News Dataset.
Precision Recall F1- Support
Score
0 0.99 0.99 0.99 5855
1 0.99 0.99 0.99 5370
Accuracy 0.99 11225
Macro Average 0.99 0.99 0.99 11225
Table 1. Performance on the Dataset
VI. Conclusion
The first stage of the research was preprocessing the data,
which involved cleaning and tokenizing the written data, removing
stop words, and performing padding and vectorization. We trained
many deep learning models on the preprocessed datasets and
evaluated their performance with respect to precision, accuracy,
recall, and F1-score. The CNN performed better than the regular
LSTM model in terms of efficiency and F1-score. The LSTM model
performs better on all three datasets and yields greater results,
making it an extremely useful model. In addition, we evaluated our
model's performance against various state-of-the-art models, such
Logistic Regression and Random Forests, to mention a couple, and
found that our model outperformed them in terms of F1-score and
accuracy. All things considered, the proposed LSTM-based model
proved to be a successful approach to the false news identification
issue. It can be used for practical purposes like social networking
applications.
Even if our method produces good results, there are still
important issues that need to be fixed. First of all, the training sample
is assumed to be representative of real-world data in our model. In
practice, nevertheless, it can be challenging to gather a
representative sample because of the dynamic nature of news items
and the persistent proliferation of erroneous information. As a result,
the model's output may vary when applied to real-world data. In
addition, word clouds were employed to display the data and get
insight into the terms that are most commonly used in real and fake
news articles. There are many opportunities for this topic to be
developed further, despite the limitations. One possible way to
improve the model's performance even further would be to use
different deep learning structures, particularly neural network
models (CNNs). Examining the use of transfer learning techniques
like pre-training or fine-tuning to take existing algorithms that have
been trained on similar tasks and modify them for the goal of
identifying false news is another avenue that may be pursued.
Although the model has limitations, there are a number of ways to
improve it further, which could improve its functionality and allow
it to be adjusted to real-world situations. All things considered, the
study has provided us with important new information about the
identification of false news and the use of social media.
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