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Fake News Detection via English-to-Spanish Translation: Is It Really Useful?

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Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis (HCII 2021)

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Abstract

Social networks are used every day to report daily events, although the information published in them many times correspond to fake news. Detecting these fake news has become a research topic that can be approached using deep learning. However, most of the current research on the topic is available only for the English language. When working on fake news detection in other languages, such as Spanish, one of the barriers is the low quantity of labeled datasets available in Spanish. Hence, we explore if it is convenient to translate an English dataset to Spanish using Statistical Machine Translation. We use the translated dataset to evaluate the accuracy of several deep learning architectures and compare the results from the translated dataset and the original dataset in fake news classification. Our results suggest that the approach is feasible, although it requires high-quality translation techniques, such as those found in the translation’s neural-based models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://opus.nlpl.eu/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.statmt.org/europarl/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/jpposadas/FakeNewsCorpusSpanish.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/dcaled/FTR-18.

  5. 5.

    http://opus.nlpl.eu/News-Commentary.php.

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Acknowledgements

Mr. Mendoza acknowledge funding from the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data. Mr. Mendoza was also funded by ANID PIA/APOYO AFB180002 and ANID FONDECYT 1200211.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Escuela de Ingeniería Civil Informática, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile

    Sebastián Ruíz & Eliana Providel

  2. Departamento de Informática, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Santiago, Chile

    Eliana Providel & Marcelo Mendoza

Authors
  1. Sebastián Ruíz
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  2. Eliana Providel
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  3. Marcelo Mendoza
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Correspondence to Marcelo Mendoza .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Gabriele Meiselwitz

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Ruíz, S., Providel, E., Mendoza, M. (2021). Fake News Detection via English-to-Spanish Translation: Is It Really Useful?. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis . HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12774. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_9

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